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

by Daniel Immerwahr

President Benjamin Harrison wondered the same thing. He had little doubt that the rioters were “American citizens” who had been working “within American territory.” Yet he worried that the Navassa Phosphate Company had turned part of the United States into its own corporate fiefdom, governed not by law, but by corporate regulations. In a remarkable turn, Harrison sent a warship, the USS Kearsage, to investigate—not the typical Gilded Age response to a workers’ uprising. When the Kearsage’s officers reported that Navassa was being run as “a convict establishment,” though without a prison’s “comforts and cleanliness,” Harrison’s sympathies tipped toward the rioters. He commuted the death sentences of the leaders and raised the issue in his annual message. “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.