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

by Daniel Immerwahr

The army’s official history of the war judges the Philippine bombing to have been just as disastrous as the Hawaiian one. At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese hobbled the United States’ Pacific fleet, sinking four battleships and damaging four others. In the Philippines, the attackers laid waste to the largest concentration of U.S. warplanes outside North America—the foundation of the Allies’ Pacific air defense. The United States lost more than planes. The attack on Pearl Harbor was just that, an attack. Japan’s bombers struck, retreated, and never returned. Not so in the Philippines. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids, then by invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos—U.S. nationals who saluted the Stars and Stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief—fell under a foreign power. They had a very different war than the inhabitants of Hawai‘i did. Nor did it stop there. The event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on U.S. and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the U.S. territories of Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island, and Wake Island. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.

That was how the first draft of FDR’s speech went, too. It presented the event as a “bombing in Hawaii and the Philippines.” Yet Roosevelt toyed with that draft all day, adding things in pencil, crossing other bits out. At some point he deleted the prominent references to the Philippines and settled on a different description. The attack was, in his revised version, a “bombing in Oahu” or, later in the speech, “on the Hawaiian Islands.” He still mentioned the Philippines, but only as an item on a terse list of Japan’s other targets: Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, and Midway—presented in that order. That list mingled U.S. and British territories together, giving no hint as to which was which.

Why did Roosevelt demote the Philippines? We don’t know, but it’s not hard to guess. Roosevelt was trying to tell a clear story: Japan had attacked the United States. But he faced a problem. Were Japan’s targets considered “the United States”? Legally, yes, they were indisputably U.S. territory. But would the public see them that way? What if Roosevelt’s audience didn’t care that Japan had attacked the Philippines or Guam? Polls taken slightly before the attack show that few in the continental United States supported a military defense of those remote territories.

Roosevelt no doubt noted that the Philippines and Guam, though technically part of the United States, seemed foreign to many. Hawai‘i, by contrast, was more plausibly “American.” Though it was a territory rather than a state, it was closer to North America and significantly whiter than the others. As a result, there was talk of eventual statehood

“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.

It was gentler because the United States had had territories before, such as Arkansas and Montana. Their place in the national firmament was a happy one. The western territories were the frontier, the leading edge of the country’s growth. They might not have had all the rights that states did, but once they were “settled” (i.e., populated by whites), they were welcomed fully into the fold as states.

Nearly nineteen million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines. Was that a lot? Not compared with the world-girdling British Empire, which boasted at the time a population of more than four hundred million (the great bulk of whom lived in India). But the United States’ empire was nonetheless sizable. Measured by population, it was, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the fifth largest in the world. Another way to consider those nineteen million territorial inhabitants is as a fraction of the U.S. population. Again taking 1940 as our year, slightly more than one in eight (12.6 percent) of the people in the United States lived outside of the states.

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.

Though I studied U.S. foreign relations as a doctoral student and read countless books about “American empire”—the wars, the coups, the meddling in foreign affairs—nobody ever expected me to know even the most elementary facts about the territories. They just didn’t feel important.

Empire might be hard to make out from the mainland, but from the sites of colonial rule themselves, it’s impossible to miss.

Philippine Islands, U.S.A.: A ten-peso note. Throughout the territories, colonized subjects were obliged to use bills with the faces of U.S. leaders on them. Extraordinarily, this Philippine bill was the basis for the design of the familiar U.S. dollar, not the other way around.

The history of the Greater United States, as I’ve come to view it, can be told in three acts. The first is westward expansion: the pushing west of national borders and the displacement of Native Americans.

The second act takes place off the continent, and it’s striking how quickly it begins. Just three years after filling out the shape of the logo map, the United States started annexing new territory overseas. First it claimed dozens of uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Then Alaska in 1867. From 1898 to 1900 it absorbed the bulk of Spain’s overseas empire (the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam) and annexed the non-Spanish lands of Hawai‘i, Wake Island, and American Samoa. In 1917 it bought the U.S. Virgin Islands. By the Second World War, the territories made up nearly a fifth of the land area of the Greater United States.

by the end of 1945 the Greater United States included some 135 million people living outside the mainland.

It won a war and gave up territory. The Philippines, its largest colony, got independence. The occupations wrapped up speedily, and only one—of a set of lightly populated islands in Micronesia—led to annexation. Other territories, though they weren’t granted independence, received new statuses. Puerto Rico became a “commonwealth,” which ostensibly replaced a coercive relationship with a consenting one. Hawai‘i and Alaska, after some delay, became states, overcoming decades of racist determination to keep them out of the union.

During the Second World War, the United States honed an extraordinary suite of technologies that gave it many of the benefits of empire without having to actually hold colonies. Plastics and other synthetics allowed it to replace tropical products with man-made substitutes. Airplanes, radio, and DDT enabled it to move its goods, ideas, and people into foreign countries easily without annexing them. Similarly, the United States managed to standardize many of its objects and practices—from screw threads to road signs to the English language—across political borders, again gaining influence in places it didn’t control. Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.

Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a handful of minor outlying islands, the United States maintains roughly eight hundred overseas military bases around the world. These tiny specks—Howland Island and the like—are the foundations of U.S. world power. They serve as staging grounds, launchpads, storage sites, beacons, and laboratories.

None of this, however—not the large colonies, small islands, or military bases—has made much of a dent on the mainland mind. One of the truly distinctive features of the United States’ empire is how persistently ignored it has been. Apart from the brief moment after 1898 when the country’s imperial dimensions were on proud display, much of its history has taken place offstage. This is, it’s worth emphasizing, unique. The British weren’t confused as to whether there was a British Empire. They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate it. France didn’t forget that Algeria was French. It is only the United States that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders. The reason isn’t hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire.

Boonesborough’s achievements were, on the face of it, modest. Yet if the what of Boonesborough was underwhelming, the where carried a larger significance. The settlement was situated on the far side of the Appalachians, which for more than a century had formed a barrier—in law and practice—to British settlement in North America. By blazing his trail through the wilderness, Boone had opened a channel through which hundreds of thousands of whites would soon pour, dragging enslaved blacks along with them.

The disregard in which Daniel Boone was held may come as a surprise. The United States, as the story is often told, was a buoyantly expansive nation from the start. Its founders had wrested liberty from an oppressive empire—turning subjects into citizens and colonies into states—and were eager to push their republican form of government westward across the continent, from sea to shining sea. Men like Daniel Boone, it would seem, were vital instruments of that national mission. Yet Boone’s path was strewn with obstacles. The British had set the ridge of the Appalachians as the boundary to white settlement, making Boone’s journey west a crime. The end of British rule did little to improve Boone’s standing. The founders viewed frontiersmen like him with open suspicion. They were the nation’s “refuse”

Boone had killed Indians, been captured by them many times, and seen a brother and two sons die by Indian hands. But he had also, during one of his stints in captivity, been adopted into a Shawnee family, receiving the name Sheltowee (meaning “Big Turtle”) and becoming “exceedingly familiar and friendly,” as he put it, with his “new parents, brothers, sisters, and friends.” This was exactly the sort of business that put Washington in favor of enforcing a British-style settlement boundary. The matter wasn’t merely philosophical for him; it was also personal. Much of Washington’s wealth lay in large tracts of western land. That land would hold its value only if he could control its sale and settlement. “Banditti” such as Boone, who took land without consulting its eastern owners, were a threat. Boone himself was a particular threat, since his claims on Kentucky conflicted with Washington’s own.

Washington’s impatience with frontiersmen didn’t mean that he opposed expansion. In the long term, he depended on it, both to strengthen the country and to profit from his western estates. The issue was the short term. The country was vast, but its government was weak. Squatters who rushed over the mountains were impossible to govern, and the wars they inevitably started were expensive to fight.

To realize their vision, the founders created a distinct political category for the frontier: territory. The revolution had been fought by a union of states, but those states’ borders became ill-defined and even overlapped as they reached westward. Rather than dividing the frontier among the states, the republic’s leaders brokered deals by which none of the Atlantic states would extend to the Mississippi, which marked the western edge of the country. Instead, western land would go to the federal government. It would be administered not as states, but as territories.

Despite his seeming satisfaction with the country’s original dimensions, Jefferson came to be known as an expansionist for his acquisition of Louisiana, which extended the country far west of the Mississippi. Yet that was more of an impulse buy than a considered purchase. In sending negotiators to Paris to bargain with Napoleon, he wasn’t even trying to get vast tracts of western land. Rather, he wanted valuable ports on the Gulf of Mexico. The initial response of Jefferson’s emissary to Napoleon’s offer of all of French North America is telling: “I told him no, that our wishes extended only to New Orleans and the Floridas.”

Cincinnati, a village in 1810, had a nine-story steam-powered mill by 1815 and a fleet of 150 steamboats by 1830. Chicago grew from a settlement of fewer than a hundred people (and fourteen taxpayers) in 1830 to a towering megalopolis with the world’s first dense cluster of skyscrapers and more than a million residents in 1890—despite having burned to the ground in 1871.

The government gave up prosecuting squatters by the 1830s and instead let them buy their land. In the 1860s it began giving away parcels of public land as “homesteads” to nearly any citizen willing to live on them.

Rather than being despised “banditti” or “white savages” on the fringes of civilization, settlers acquired a new identity: pioneers. No longer scofflaws, they were the proud flag-bearers of a dynamic nation. As squatters became pioneers, Daniel Boone’s reputation surged. After his death, he was retroactively claimed as an honorary founding father.

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.

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

For the first few decades of the country’s history, this continental-scale apartheid had remained informal and incomplete. It was the population boom—particularly the crisis surrounding the lands of the Cherokees and neighboring tribes in the Southeast in the 1830s—that gave the issue a new urgency. To handle it, Andrew Jackson sought and won new legislation to allow him to aggressively negotiate east-for-west deals.

Jackson sweetened the pot. Within Indian Country, his administration proposed to designate a smaller-but-still-really-large area, somewhere between the size of California and Texas, as Western Territory. This would be an organized territory, governed by a confederacy of Indian polities and given a delegate in Congress. The goal, as the government’s representative explained, was that Western Territory would be “admitted as a state to become a member of the Union.” It was a striking proposal. The government had reserved plots of land for individual polities before, but it hadn’t created any Indian political units. Now the idea was to establish a permanent territory inhabited solely by Native Americans. Like Illinois or Arkansas, but bigger.

The cost, however, was that this would formally divide the country into unequal parts, a settler part and an Indian part. It was a starker and potentially more permanent partition than the existing state/territory division, and former president John Quincy Adams fretted about what it might do to the nation’s character. The idea, he warned, was “not republican at all.” It was something an empire would do, an act of “despotism.” Adams’s Southern colleagues in Congress raised another concern. 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?”

If Indian Country looked tenuous from its start in the 1830s, it looked even more so in the 1840s, with the annexation of Texas, the conquest of much of Mexico, and the extinction of the British claims in Oregon. Suddenly Indian Country was no longer pressed up against the nation’s western border. It stood exposed in the middle, right between the bustling East and the burgeoning West.

Because in 1857, not long after the Gadsden Purchase was ratified (1854), the United States began annexing small islands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific. By the end of the century, it would claim almost a hundred of them. The islands had no indigenous populations and, at the time, no strategic value. They tended to be remote, rocky, and rainless—poor places to grow things on. But that didn’t matter. They had the one thing that everyone in the nineteenth century badly wanted. They had “white gold,” known in less polite circles as bird shit.

Nineteenth-century agronomists cringed at the thought of large cities flushing into rivers and oceans the nitrogenous wastes that could have fertilized the fields. The author of a much-used textbook estimated the annual value of “lost” human feces to be $50 million, which approached the size of the federal budget.

but the guano on everyone’s minds was the nitrogen-rich droppings of cormorants, boobies, and pelicans on the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. Islands make attractive rookeries for seabirds in general. The Chinchas had the additional virtue that they hardly ever saw rain. The guano piled hundreds of feet high and baked in the sun, so that the very rock of the islands was centuries’ worth of calcified bird droppings.

Guano was noxious, “a beastly smelling-bottle sort of mess, looking like bad snuff mixed with rotten kittens,” as a Vermont paper put it. Virginia’s senator deemed it “the most odious and disagreeable material that can be imagined.” Its sharp, ammoniacal smell was notorious, perceptible from miles off. Sailors hauling guano could spend no more than fifteen minutes belowdecks with it.

And yet, sprinkled in small quantities over the nitrogen-parched farms of North America, the stuff worked miracles. The first ships carrying Peruvian guano arrived in the 1840s and quickly sparked a mania. It was, crowed the Cleveland Herald, the “cheapest, most powerful, enduring, and portable fertilizer” of all. Tall tales spread, about the father who locked his ten-year-old son in a barn with a pile of guano and unlocked it hours later to discover a full-grown man in his place, or the farmer whose guanoed cucumber plants shot out of the dirt and seized him with their vines.

Just a single Peruvian island, one of Delaware’s senators intimated, would be worth more than the Gadsden Purchase, Cuba, and all the rest of the Caribbean combined.

Guano Islands Act in 1856. Under its terms, whenever a U.S. citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.” 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.

Perhaps the lawmakers were right to mumble, as this was a significant departure from the past. At every other stage in U.S. history, territorial expansion had been contentious, debated in newspapers and fought over in Congress. Now, if the law passed, any random adventurer would be “at liberty to tramp about the Pacific, or any other ocean, and annex islands to the United States,” as one paper put it.

Guano mining—tunneling, picking, and blasting the stuff loose and hauling it to waiting ships—was arguably the single worst job you could have in the nineteenth century. It offered all the backbreaking labor and lung damage of coal mining, but to do the job, you had to be marooned on a hot, dry, pestilential, and foul-smelling island for months. Respiratory diseases, causing workers to pass out or cough up blood, were common. So were gastrointestinal ailments—the unsurprising consequence of crowded conditions, rotten food, and a dearth of fresh water.

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.

The Guano Islands Act, the Supreme Court’s ruling, and President Harrison’s backing of that ruling collectively established that the borders of the United States needn’t be confined to the continent. In 1889–90, when the Navassa controversy was in the news, this was a minor concern. But in the decades to come, it would be the foundation for the United States’ entire overseas empire. The second legacy was strategic. The same features that made the islands attractive rookeries for seabirds made them, decades later, desirable sites for airfields. The pointillist empire that the United States built after the Second World War would rely in part on those nineteenth-century guano claims. The third and most immediate legacy was agricultural. In all, speculators scraped some four hundred thousand tons of rock guano off of U.S. appurtenances. That fell short of speculators’ wildest hopes, but it was nevertheless a significant haul.

The breakthrough came in 1909, when Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish chemist, developed a technique for synthesizing ammonia, a nitrogen compound. By 1914, the experimental technique had become industrially viable, and in that year Haber’s method, called the Haber–Bosch process, yielded as much reactive nitrogen as the entire Peruvian guano trade. The difference was that Haber–Bosch, unlike guano mining, was infinitely expandable. It also didn’t require scouring the seas for uninhabited islands. In a single stroke, Haber had opened the floodgates for the virtually unlimited growth of human life. The Malthusian logic was repealed. Soil exhaustion ceased to be an existential threat; you could just add more chemicals. Without Haber–Bosch, the earth could sustain, at present rates of consumption, only about 2.4 billion people. That is well under half of today’s population.

Nor did Haber stop there. He assembled a supergroup of German scientists, four of whom, like he, would go on to win Nobel Prizes. Overseeing their efforts, he introduced his second great invention: poison gas. Not only did Haber invent it, he personally supervised its debut in 1915, releasing hundreds of tons of chlorine gas upwind of some Algerian troops at the Battle of Ypres. In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.

Powerful men usually come from powerful places. There has never been a president born in a U.S. territory, and though a few spent time in the territories, they were rarely there for long. Young Abraham Lincoln and Zachary Taylor moved with their families to western territories, but only just before those territories became states (within months, in Lincoln’s case). Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, and William Henry Harrison worked in the territories later in life but in the service of the federally appointed territorial governments, not as settlers. Harrison, for whom the myth of the “log cabin” was invented, spent his childhood on a lavish Virginia plantation and lived in the Northwest Territory not in a cabin, but in the governor’s residence. Few leading politicians, in other words, actually participated in the settlement boom. Few, that is, except for Theodore Roosevelt.

For Roosevelt, this went far beyond playacting. He really believed the stuff. Like no president before or after, Roosevelt identified, viscerally, with the historical forces that had extended the borders of the country west and filled it with white settlers.

Roosevelt’s frontier-centered view of the United States found expression in The Winning of the West, his scholarly exploration of the “great deeds of the border people” in four volumes. It was history red in tooth and claw. Roosevelt showed little patience for the “statesmen of the Atlantic seaboard” who were congenitally “unable to fully appreciate the magnitude of the interests at stake in the west.” In his telling, not George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett—fighting Indians, hacking their way through the woods—were the true authors of the nation’s history.

What Roosevelt and Turner had noticed was a fact not just about the United States, but about the world. For industrializing societies, the nineteenth century had been one of relatively easy expansion. The United States spread west, Russia spread east, and the European powers turned south, toward colonies in Asia and Africa. Yet by the century’s end, it looked finished. Indian Country had been ground down to a small nub, Africa was carved up, and even the Pacific islands, save some in the far south, were under the flag of distant governments. Add into the accounting such areas as Latin America, the Middle East, and China, which had been partitioned into spheres of influence and commercial control, and it was hard to see where future expansion might take place.