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

by Daniel Immerwahr

After his death, he was retroactively claimed as an honorary founding father. A statue was placed on the steps of the Capitol in 1851: a frontiersman, bearing a conspicuous resemblance to Boone, fighting an Indian. It stood there for more than a century.

By 1800, the indigenous population was closer to half a million, having endured what may have been a 90 percent decline.

In 1827 the Cherokee Nation adopted a constitution, modeled on the U.S. Constitution. Voters elected a mixed-race, wealthy, Christian president, Koo-wi-s-gu-wi, who had fought beside Andrew Jackson and went by his European name, John Ross.

In 1828 the state of Georgia declared the Cherokee constitution invalid and demanded the Cherokees’ land. President Andrew Jackson approved.

If Congress were to “add to our Union men of blood and color alien to the people of the United States,” the Virginia representative asked, “where was that right to stop? Why not introduce our brethren of Cuba and Hayti?” And then there was that business of Western Territory’s congressional delegate. “I am not prepared to receive the Indians into this hall,” declared Georgia’s representative with a huff.

Without Haber–Bosch, the earth could sustain, at present rates of consumption, only about 2.4 billion people.

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

In just over six hours on May 1, 1898, Dewey sank or captured every Spanish ship. The captain of Spain’s flagship was killed. The commander of Spain’s shoreside batteries committed suicide.

this was a man who was in turn a Harvard student, cowboy, policeman, war hero, and president, as well as an African explorer—virtually the entire list of boyhood fantasies, minus astronaut. Later in life, as he was about to speak at a campaign event, Roosevelt got shot in the chest at close range and then proceeded to give his intended speech for an hour as the blood ran from his body.

The Mexican War of 1846–48 had ended with U.S. forces occupying Mexico City. Some in Congress proposed taking all of Mexico. From a military perspective, that was entirely feasible. But South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, one of the nation’s prime defenders of slavery, objected. “We have never dreamt of incorporating into the Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race,” he insisted on the Senate floor. “Are we to associate with ourselves, as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed races of Mexico?”

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.

The siege of Manila—undertaken jointly by the U.S. Army and the Philippine Army of Liberation—ended when Spain surrendered the city to the United States alone. After U.S. troops entered the city, locking out their comrades in arms, McKinley issued his declaration. There would be “no joint occupation with the insurgents,” and the Filipinos “must recognize the military occupation and authority of the United States.”

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.

To win Filipinos over, they inaugurated an extensive campaign of sanitation, road-building, and education in the areas they controlled. In those they didn’t, they staged raids, shooting insurgents and torching villages.

Those inside the reconcentration zones were “pacified.” Those outside were not, and could be treated accordingly: cutting off their food supplies, burning their homes, or simply shooting them.

George Frisbie Hoar, the leading anti-imperialist in Congress, shook his head. “We crushed the only republic in Asia.”

A Republican congressman who toured Luzon in 1902 reported what he saw to a newspaper. “The country was marched over and cleaned in a most resolute manner,” he said. “Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country, and wherever or whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him.”

The most careful study, made by the historian Ken De Bevoise, found that in the years 1899–1903, about 775,000 Filipinos died because of the war.

In fact, Pershing proved to be extraordinarily sympathetic toward the Moros. He made diplomatic visits to them, unarmed. He studied their language and customs, ate their food (“I have never tasted more delicious chicken”), and counted some as “strong personal friends.” By 1903 he was taking low-level meetings without an interpreter.

Cuba also agreed, as part of the price of getting Wood to leave, to lease a forty-five-square-mile port to the United States for military use. Guantánamo Bay, as the leased land was called, would technically remain Cuban territory, but the United States would have “complete jurisdiction and control” over it.

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 only nationalist leader from outside Europe who won Wilson’s ear in Paris was Jan Smuts, soon to be the South African prime minister, who sought an international system that would bolster the white control of southern Africa.

The Japanese delegation asked to at least insert language about racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. This proposal had a majority of votes behind it—the French delegation deemed the cause “indisputable.” But Wilson blocked it, refusing to let even the principle of racial equality stand.

Such animosity meant little to U.S. leaders at the time—they didn’t have much business in places like Egypt and Korea. But later it would come to mean a great deal. The Chinese protester complaining of “robbers” in Paris—that was a young Mao Zedong. Nguyen the Patriot also gained renown, although by another name: Ho Chi Minh. That Egyptian boy reciting poems and making speeches was Sayyid Qutb,

Japan latched on to the bitterness of the colonized. Japanese propagandists reminded Filipinos of the United States’ long history of empire, starting with the dispossession of North American Indians and moving through the Mexican War, the annexation of Spain’s colonies, and the Philippine War, right up to the scorched-earth policy adopted in the face of the Japanese invasion.

Emperor Hirohito claimed that the war’s origins lay “in the past, in the peace treaty after World War I,” when Woodrow Wilson had blocked Japan’s attempt to introduce racial equality into the League of Nations covenant.

“If you escaped the shells of the Americans, you could not escape the machine guns or bayonets of the Japanese,”

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.

After the war, Filipinos submitted claims to the government on behalf of 1,111,938

war deaths. Add Japanese (518,000) and mainlander fatalities (the army counted slightly more than 10,000) and the total climbs to more than 1.6 million.

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.”

Nineteen fifty-nine was the year of statehood. The next year, 1960, a Kenyan student met a Kansan one in the Russian class at the University of Hawaii. The two married—an interracial marriage illegal in two dozen states at the time—and had a son, who would grow up partly in Hawai‘i, partly in Indonesia. In typical Hawaiian fashion, his profoundly multiracial extended family would grow by marriage to incorporate African American, British, Lithuanian, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Chinese elements. And in 2009 that son, Barack Obama, would become the first black president of the United States.

Brown recorded with alarm his students’ anger as he sought to teach them English. He noted how, years after the publication of Dr. Cornelius Rhoads’s letter (which had described physicians delighting in the “abuse and torture” of their patients), many Puerto Ricans still refused to enter governmental hospitals. They feared that mainland doctors were plotting to kill them.

With a supportive government and a network of clinics, Puerto Rico became a laboratory for all sorts of experimental contraceptives: diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, spirals, loops, intrauterine devices, hormone shots, and an “aerosol vaginal foam” known as “Emko” distributed to tens of thousands of women.

One hospital refused to admit women for their fourth delivery unless they agreed to be sterilized after.

On March 1, 1954, shortly after the UN’s decision, four nationalists entered the House of Representatives in Washington. They made their way to the upstairs gallery, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, and shouted “¡Viva Puerto Rico Libre!” Then they pulled out pistols and fired twenty-nine rounds into the body politic below. It was, the Speaker of the House remembered, “the wildest scene in the entire history of Congress.” Splinters flew as the bullets sprayed over the chamber.

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.

The plaque the astronauts left captured that internationalist spirit. “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969, A.D.” read the text, under pictures of the hemispheres of the globe. “We came in peace for all mankind.”

There was, of course, one exception: oil.

Many of the chemistry-for-colonies exchanges the United States made, including synthetic rubber and plastic, involved substituting petroleum for other materials.

It is fitting, then, that oil is the one raw material that has most reliably tempted politicians back into the old logic of empire.

For every soldier overseas, the United States would ship sixty-seven pounds of matériel abroad per day.

On the centennial of Samuel Morse’s 1844 WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT message, which had traveled between Washington and Baltimore, the Signal Corps sent the same message around the world in three and a half minutes.

Less than a year later, it sent another message around the globe in nine and a half seconds.

Whole Pacific islands were blanketed by DDT in advance of landings, destroying the main vectors of disease before the first men hit the beaches.

On Saipan, he wrote, “scarcely a living thing” remained after the planes had made their passes. “No birds, no mammals, no insects, except a few flies, and the plant life was decreasing.” It’s likely that some of the devastation he saw was caused by the solvent used with DDT rather than the insecticide itself, but the lesson was nonetheless clear.

Combined, the antimalarials and DDT were transformative. By 1944, the malaria rate in MacArthur’s disease-ridden command had dropped 95 percent.

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.

Herbert Hoover, as a man, can best be understood as the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt. Whereas Roosevelt lusted for combat and styled himself as a cowboy, Hoover was a Quaker who had lived for a year among Osages in Indian Country (he later had Charles Curtis, a Native American with Osage heritage, as his vice president). Roosevelt chafed at rules; Hoover once refused to let former president Benjamin Harrison into a college baseball game without a ticket. Roosevelt gave his horse the dramatic name Rain-in-the-Face; Hoover’s animal companion was a cat, whom he addressed as Mr. Cat. And whereas Roosevelt had a lifelong obsession with big game hunting, Hoover’s love was fishing, an activity he revered for its “quieting of hate,” “hushing to ambition,” and promotion of “meekness.”