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

by Daniel Immerwahr

never before. Teddy Roosevelt had been the first sitting president to leave the continental United States—a seventeen-day trip to Panama and Puerto Rico. His successors also journeyed outward while in office but, like him, generally confined themselves to single trips within the Western Hemisphere. William Howard Taft spent a day in Mexico. Warren G. Harding visited Alaska and Vancouver in July 1923, but he became violently ill during the trip and died immediately upon returning. Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded him, went to Cuba for three days, and Herbert Hoover spent three days in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Only Woodrow Wilson, who visited Europe twice for the Paris Peace Conference, went abroad more than once or journeyed beyond the Americas.