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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Roosevelt might have taken this as cause for despair. Yet just as he was reading Frederick Jackson Turner’s warnings about the end of the frontier, he was also studying the work of another historian, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the Naval War College. Mahan’s lengthy 1890 treatise, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, was hardly a page-turner, but it contained a powerful suggestion. If, according to Turner, the land was closed, Mahan noted that the seas were open. Mahan didn’t care about democracy or individualism, as Turner did. His concern was trade. The wealth of nations, he argued, came from maritime commerce. Yet ships could not simply cast off for distant lands. They needed ports, coaling stations, warehouses, and other way stations along their paths. They also needed naval protection, which required still more overseas bases.

was, in Roosevelt’s eyes, more than a naval classic. It was a playbook for a dynamic country that had just encountered the limits to its growth. The United States must seize an empire. And if it had to carve it out of existing empires, so be it. “I should welcome almost any war,” Roosevelt declared in 1897, “for I think this country needs one.”

McKinley settled on a half measure. At Roosevelt’s urging, he agreed to station a warship, the USS Maine, off the coast of Havana as a show of resolve. Beyond that, he would continue to wait. Not for long, as it turned out. On February 15, 1898, the Maine mysteriously exploded, killing 262 men. It was, depending on the explanation, possibly an act of war. “I don’t propose to be swept off my feet by the catastrophe,” wrote McKinley the next day. “The country can afford to withhold its judgment and not strike an avenging blow until the truth is known.” Roosevelt displayed none of McKinley’s caution. “Dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards” was his diagnosis, and the newspapers concurred. “Remember the Maine!” replaced “Remember the Alamo!” as the battle cry of a wounded nation. In retrospect, McKinley was right to hesitate. As far as we can tell, the Maine’s explosion was probably the result of spontaneous combustion in its coal bunkers, a surprisingly common hazard at the time

The Battle of Manila Bay, as the resulting conflict was known, made an auspicious start to the war. “Nineteenth century civilization and fifteenth century medievalism lay confronting each other” is how Dewey’s aide described the scene. 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. The only U.S. fatality was due to a heart attack.

What happened next has been recounted so many times that it’s hard to register how bizarre it was. That the man who played such an important part in starting and expanding the war—a political appointee with no combat experience—should also become the hero of its decisive battle seems more fictional than factual. But an aura of “Wait, that really happened?” engulfed much of Theodore Roosevelt’s life. After all, 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.

From Roosevelt’s perspective, the dash up Kettle Hill was more dramatic. He lustily galloped up and down the line, “passing the shouting, cheering, firing men.” A bullet grazed his elbow as the Rough Riders took the hill. He could have stopped there, with a wound and a story to tell, but he looked over to San Juan Hill, where a U.S. division had engaged the Spanish, and judged he could take that, too. He let his horse go, jumped a fence, and with a handful of men (“bullets were ripping the grass all around us”) charged on foot. Looking back to see no one following, Roosevelt ran back to Kettle Hill (still under fire), hopped back over the fence, and berated his troops. Now, with his men finally behind him, he crossed the fence a third time, crested the hill, and killed a Spaniard with his Maine-salvaged revolver. Right after that, with the Spaniards subdued, Roosevelt and the Rough Riders repeated their charge for the benefit of a film crew—the first documentary battle footage ever shot.

The empire that had once dominated the Americas had been defeated entirely in less than four months—a “splendid little war,” the ambassador to Britain remarked to Roosevelt. Back home, writers crowed about the vigor of the United States and the decrepitude of Spain. The Spanish empire was a “house of cards,” wrote Woodrow Wilson. “When the American power touched it it fell to pieces.” The president of Stanford offered a similar explanation: “We succeeded because we were bigger, richer, and far more capable than our enemy.”

It’s easy to regard Spain as an obsolete feudal power—the Sick Man of the Caribbean. But Spain had a sizable and seasoned imperial army. Its 200,000 troops in Cuba, 30,000 in the Philippines, and 8,000 in Puerto Rico easily outnumbered the 25,000 officers and men that the United States had on hand on the eve of the war. McKinley hastily inflated the army to some 275,000 troops, but it reached that size only at the end of the war, well after the major battles had been won.

Part of the answer, mentioned frequently, is that the U.S. Navy was in better shape than the Spanish one (the consequence of Mahan’s influence). But another part, too often ignored, is that the United States was not the only adversary Spain was fighting. The war is usually called the Spanish-American War and is said to have started in 1898. Yet a more accurate name would be the Spanish–Cuban–Puerto Rican–Philippine–American War. Cubans call it the War of 1895, Filipinos date its start at 1896—and neither of those counts the many earlier uprisings and wars. The United States was, in other words, a latecomer, supplying a burst of force at the end of a long, bloody conflict that had already nearly destroyed the Spanish Empire.

Cubans, Filipinos, and (to a much lesser degree) Puerto Ricans had fought Spain for decades, draining its resources and exhausting its morale. Yet little of this registered in the United States. Right after landing in Cuba—the landing enabled by the Cuban defeat of Spanish troops at Daiquirí—Roosevelt eyed his Cuban allies and judged them to be “utter tatterdemalions” of “no use in serious fighting.” “We should have been better off if there had not been a single Cuban with the army,” he wrote. “They accomplished literally nothing.” That judgment, which was shared widely, mattered. Feeling that Cubans had contributed little to the war, U.S. commanders felt no compunctions about sidelining them from the peace. Thus did they negotiate first the surrender of Santiago and then of Cuba directly with Spain, excluding the Cubans.

The war may have begun as an empire-wide revolt by Spain’s colonial subjects, but it ended as the “Spanish-American War.” The peace treaty, negotiated in Paris, was between Spain and the United States alone. Spain sold the Philippines to the United States for $20 million. Puerto Rico and Guam (a Micronesian island, valuable as a Mahan-style base) came free. Because of the amendment anti-imperialists had passed, the United States couldn’t annex Cuba. But it could occupy it, placing the country under military control until a suitable government could be installed—a government suitable to Washington, that is.

The war with Spain gave rise to the only moment in U.S. history when cartographers aggressively rejected the logo map. In its place they offered maps of the empire.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, though, all that changed. One sharp-eared British writer heard the switch. “For some thirty years prior to 1898, while the adjective ‘American’ has been in general use, the noun ‘America’ has been extremely rare,” he wrote.

‘United States’ being almost invariably the term employed by the American for his own country.” After 1898, though, he noted that “the best speakers and writers,” feeling that the United States no longer captured the nature of their country, switched to America.

Looking back on the years before 1898, one sees a pattern. Though the United States had rapidly annexed new territory, it had rarely incorporated large nonwhite populations. Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, Texas, and the Mexican cessions—these added a lot of area to the country but only relatively small “foreign” populations (Native Americans mainly, but also Mexicans, Spaniards, French, and, in the case of Louisiana, free blacks).

Before 1898, the largest population bump from annexation came from the lands wrested from Mexico (including Texas) between 1845 and 1853. Yet, as bumps go, it wasn’t much. While those accessions enlarged the country’s area by 69 percent, the accompanying Indians and Mexicans increased its population by less than 1.5 percent over eight years. In the demographically explosive United States, where the population was already growing at more than 3 percent a year, that small influx was easily diluted: a sprinkler in a rainstorm.

The United States annexed the thinly populated northern part of Mexico (including present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) but let the populous southern part go. This carefully drawn border gave the United States, as one newspaper put it, “all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people.”

Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and this is what you got: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that fed on land but avoided incorporating people. Uninhabited guano islands—those were fine. But all of Mexico or Nicaragua? No.

In the late 1860s the president of the Dominican Republic signaled that he would welcome the U.S. purchase of his country. President Ulysses S. Grant was eager for the deal—the Dominican Republic was, after all, prime sugar and coffee real estate. Yet even with a rich country served up on a plate, even at the urging of a popular war-hero president whose party controlled Congress, legislators wouldn’t swallow the bait. The Dominican Republic was “situated in tropical waters, and occupied by another race, of another color,” explained the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, and “never can become a permanent possession of the United States.”

The Greater America Exposition had intended to explore the questions of empire. Yet here its organizers had inadvertently raised the knottiest one of all. The territories were on the maps, yes. But were the people who lived in them “Americans”?

The court affirmed that “the Constitution deals with states” and that territorial rights were at Congress’s discretion. Congress could, if it wished, “incorporate” territories into the union and bring them under the protection of the Constitution, as the court judged that it had in the case of the western territories. Some years later, the court also concluded that Alaska and Hawai‘i, the territories beyond the mainland that seemed the most conducive to white settlement, had also been “incorporated.” But the point was that incorporation was not automatic, and the court repeatedly denied that Congress had ever incorporated the former Spanish colonies.

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.”

Similarly, the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee to anyone born in the United States doesn’t apply to the unincorporated territories. In them, citizenship came late and only after struggle. What is more, it arrived as “statutory citizenship,” meaning that it was secured by legislation rather than by the Constitution and could therefore be rescinded. Puerto Ricans became citizens in 1917, U.S. Virgin Islanders in 1927, and Guamanians in 1950, though in all cases, because their citizenship is statutory, it can be revoked.

American Samoans, despite having been “American” since 1900, are still legally only “U.S. nationals.” They are allowed to fight in the armed forces, which they do in extraordinary numbers—theirs is ranked top of all 885 U.S. Army recruiting stations. But they are not citizens, as the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to them.

Up to mid-1902, the U.S. military lost 4,196 men, more than three-quarters of whom died of disease. It counted around 16,000 combat fatalities on the opposite side. But that number represents only recorded war deaths and is a tiny fraction of total mortality. General J. Franklin Bell, the architect of the reconcentration strategy, estimated that on Luzon alone the war had killed one-sixth of the population, roughly 600,000. Textbooks usually offer an estimate of 250,000 for the whole archipelago, though there is no hard evidence behind that figure. 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.

Every one of the army’s first twelve chiefs of staff, in fact, served in the Philippine War. Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought.

The “Greater United States” maps in vogue a decade earlier were no doubt still hanging on some classroom walls, but by 1916 few such maps were being newly commissioned. Cartographers had returned to the logo maps, showing only the states. Nationalism was seizing the country, all the more so as the First World War approached. And as the idea of the nation—a union of states sharing a culture, language, and history—grew in prominence, the colonies seemed more distant and nebulous, literally vanishing from maps and atlases.

Roosevelt made a Cuba-style deal. His government would gain temporary control of Dominican finances (thus ensuring repayment of the debt to U.S. banks) in exchange for defending the Morales government from rebels and external enemies. U.S. interests would be protected, and the Dominican Republic would remain independent. The ploy was used repeatedly, in country after country around the Caribbean. The United States seized the levers of finance and trade but left sovereignty formally intact. “Dollar diplomacy” was the polite name for this, though “gunboat diplomacy” was the more accurate euphemism.

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 United States helped to put down revolts, replaced governments when necessary, and offered battleships-in-the-harbor “advice” to others. But the only territory it annexed in that period was the U.S. Virgin Islands, peacefully purchased from Denmark in 1917.

It would be hard to overstate the consequences of these dashed hopes on the colonized world. The year 1919 was, for the colonies, when the switch was thrown, when nationalist movements abandoned polite petitioning. It was the year when Gandhi gave up his hope that India might be an equal partner within the British confederation and set his sights on independence. It was the year when everything seemed to spin out of control for the British in India: Gandhi’s nonviolence campaigns, government repression (the “Amritsar Massacre”), an invasion by Afghanistan, and an uprising of Indian Muslims that acquired all-India proportions.

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, a leading Islamist thinker who would become the key inspiration for Osama bin Laden. And Albizu? Pedro Albizu Campos would become the most dangerous domestic anti-imperialist the United States would ever face.

Had Daniel Burnham lived through the 1930s and returned to the Philippines, he would have been thrilled by what he saw. In Chicago, he’d struggled mightily for years to realize his vision (and his allies had worked for decades to do so after his death). In the Philippines, however, just half a year’s hasty work, only six weeks of it in-country, sufficed to remake one city and build another from the ground up. Such were the joys of empire. The colonies were, for men like Burnham, playgrounds, places to carry out ideas without worrying about the counterforces that encumbered action at home. Mainlanders could confiscate land, redirect taxes, and waste workers’ lives to build paradises in the mountains.

Hookworms flourished so abundantly on the island’s coffee estates that they didn’t only enfeeble workers, they killed them. By the turn of the century, anemia was the leading cause of death in the colony, accounting for some 20 to 30 percent of mortality.

resources from the colonial government. Whereas the Southern campaign began with a million-dollar grant from John D. Rockefeller, the Puerto Rican one started with $5,000 from the colonial treasury. After Ashford and Gutiérrez demonstrated that deworming worked, they begged for funds to permanently eradicate hookworm disease. But the money that arrived was, in their judgment, “utterly inadequate”: half what was needed in the best year, then down to a third. In 1908 the government didn’t appropriate any funds, so all dispensaries were officially closed

was an important post. Though the Chemical Warfare Service ran tests on animals—goats were a favorite—it insisted that all gases and equipment be ultimately tested on humans. Those humans were soldiers, recruited with modest inducements such as extra leave time or appeals to patriotism. They participated in three types of tests. In the drop test, liquid was applied to their skin. In the field test, planes sprayed them from overhead. In the chamber test, sometimes called the “man-break test,” participants were locked in gas chambers and gassed until they faltered. Those inhaling gas usually had protective gear, but the tests often pushed past the point where that gear functioned. In some cases, that meant days in gas chambers or in the jungle with gas bombs dropping overhead. Participants seeking to leave midway through were threatened with court-martial. During the war, the military tested its gases and gear on more than sixty thousand of its own men.

Today, Cornelius Rhoads lives in Puerto Rican memory as a villain. On the mainland, however, he’s been remembered differently: as a pioneer of chemotherapy.

The indifference toward the colonies in the culture was met with an equal indifference in the government. Whereas Britain governed its possessions from large, prominent, and imposing edifices, the United States had no colonial building in its capital. Nor did it have a school to train colonial officials. Its territories were ruled by a haphazard and improvised set of bureaucratic arrangements under the army, navy, and Department of the Interior. It showed. The men sent to run the territories, unlike the trained administrators who oversaw European colonies, simply didn’t know much about the places to which they’d been assigned, and they cycled rapidly through their posts. Between Guam’s annexation in 1899 and World War II, it had nearly forty governors. FDR’s first governor of Puerto Rico, who served for six months, spoke no Spanish and left reporters with the distinct impression that he didn’t know where the island was. There was a period of several months when the territory of Alaska, which is half the physical size of India, didn’t have a single federal official in it.

Mahan had predicted back in the 1890s. As international trade doors slammed shut, large economies were forced to subsist largely on their own domestic produce. Domestic, in this context, included colonies, though, since one of empire’s chief benefits was the unrestricted economic access it brought to faraway lands. It mattered to major imperial powers—the Dutch, the French, the British—that they could still get tropical products such as rubber from their colonies in Asia. And it mattered to the industrial countries without large empires—Germany, Italy, Japan—that they couldn’t.

The United States was in a peculiar position. It had colonies, but they weren’t its lifeline. Oil, cotton, iron, coal, and many of the important minerals that other industrial economies found hard to secure—the United States had these in abundance on its enormous mainland. Rubber and tin it could still purchase from Malaya via its ally Britain. It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”). Yet the United States didn’t depend on its colonies in the same way that other empires did.

Most of what the United States got from its colonies was sugar, grown on plantations in Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. Yet even in sugar, the United States wasn’t dependent. Sugarcane grew in the subtropical South, in Louisiana and Florida. It could also be made from beets, and in the interwar years the United States bought more sugar from mainland beet farmers than it did from any of its territories.

Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who somehow managed to trade up authority over New York’s parks—a position that traditionally entailed little more than serving the needs of the city’s bird-watchers—into a decades-long stranglehold over municipal politics. On the national level, there was J. Edgar Hoover, the spymaster who held presidents under his thumb. And in foreign relations, exercising more effective authority than perhaps anyone else in U.S. history, it was Douglas MacArthur.

“War,” the comedian Jon Stewart has observed, is “God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

Nervous about a Japanese invasion and eager to put its massive Pacific territory to use, the Roosevelt administration set out to build a road. This would not only connect Alaska to the mainland, it would help the government ferry supplies to the allied Soviet Union.

Across the empire, backwaters became battle stations. And with the military came federal money, washing indiscriminately over lands long parched by neglect. In Puerto Rico, workers moved from faltering sugar plantations to jobs building and operating military bases. By 1950, the federal government had spent $1.2 billion there. The same thing happened to Hawai‘i, the hub of the Pacific war. After Pearl Harbor, the military arrived en masse, bringing with it an insatiable demand. Unemployment vanished, the number of restaurants in Honolulu tripled, and bank deposits throughout the territory quintupled.

Life in a war zone was a life shaped by precaution. It meant carrying around a gas mask when out (the University of Hawaii graduates processed in cap and gown and gas mask).

But the safeguards weren’t only against invaders. The military also insisted on extraordinary precautions against the people of Hawai‘i themselves. Hawai‘i was “enemy country,” as the secretary of the navy saw it, with a suspect population, more than one-third of which was of Japanese ancestry. Thus were the territory’s residents registered, fingerprinted, and vaccinated—the first mass fingerprinting and the largest compulsory vaccination campaign the United States had ever undertaken.

Beyond guns in the street, the army established a system of provost courts to enforce its laws. The justice they dispensed was hasty and harsh. Trials were often held on the day of arrest and lasted minutes. In the first four months in Honolulu, a single judge dispatched about a hundred cases per day. There were no juries, no journalists, no subpoenaing of witnesses, and, for the most part, no lawyers. Armed military officials, who rarely had legal training, interpreted the facts and the law with maximum discretion—defendants could be and were convicted of violating the “spirit of martial law.” Not surprisingly, convictions were the rule. Of the more than twenty thousand trials conducted in one of Honolulu’s provost courts in 1942, 98.4 percent resulted in guilty verdicts.

Martial law in Hawai‘i lasted nearly three years, which was two and a half years longer than Japan posed any plausible threat to the islands. Yet Hawai‘i’s military commanders repeatedly refused to relinquish control.

In June 1942 Japan bombed Dutch Harbor and conquered the Aleutian islands of Agattu, Attu, and Kiska (“Somebody ought to be impeached,” grumbled Manuel Quezon when he heard the news of yet another bit of barely defended territory falling into Japanese hands). The Japanese occupied the islands for more than a year and transported Attu’s tiny population (42) to Japan as prisoners of war. Half of them died there. Conquering part of Alaska was a significant achievement, and propagandists brought relics from the Aleutians to the Japanese home islands for proud display. U.S mainlanders were far less aware of the event, and that is because of official censorship.

Most striking was the near-total lockdown on information. On the mainland, censorship was handled with a surprisingly light touch. The government merely requested that editors not publish details about sensitive matters. In Alaska, by contrast, censorship was mandatory and vigorous. Printed materials going into the territory were heavily censored, so that even Gruening—the governor—had his mail opened and articles scissored out of his copies of The Washington Post and Newsweek.