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

by Daniel Immerwahr

The 1901 rulings are collectively known as the Insular Cases (the term can also encompass some later cases). But they are not the cases for which the turn-of-the-century court is best known. Eight of the nine justices who decided the 1901 Insular Cases also decided Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the notorious case that upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” Jim Crow institutions. On the face of it, the two rulings have much in common. Plessy permitted segregation, the division of the country into separate spaces, some reserved for whites, others for nonwhites. The Insular Cases split the country into what one justice called “practically two national governments,” one bound by the Bill of Rights, the other not. And, like Plessy, the Insular Cases were about race. The main majority decision contained warnings about including “savages” and “alien races” within the constitutional fold. Doing so, one of the justices concurred, would “wreck our institutions,” perhaps leading the “whole structure of the government” to be “overthrown.”