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

by Daniel Immerwahr

An incensed Ernest Gruening traveled to Washington to complain of the “introduction of Gestapo methods to the United States.” But he found, in a perfect catch-22, that the censorship was so complete that even congressmen didn’t know of it. Alaska was thus the “quietest war theater,” or the “hidden front,” as journalists called it. Today it is the forgotten war. Many people are surprised to learn that the Japanese even came near Alaska.

The long internment wasn’t born of any animosity toward the Aleuts. They weren’t the “enemy.” It just seems that officials found it easier to keep the Aleuts where they were—far away—than to bring them home. Plus, the military had taken over many of their homes. And because censorship was watertight, there was no public pressure. Nobody knew.

Much in the way that many African Americans fought abroad to vindicate their demands for equality at home, the inhabitants of the Pacific territory joined the war effort with a clear determination, as if they had something to prove. Hawai‘i’s war bond sales were the highest in the country, consistently between two and nearly four times the national average. Alaska’s, as of at least the middle of the war, ranked second. Even as they faced more extreme governmental intrusions than mainlanders, the people of the Pacific territories bankrolled the war.

Both the all-Hawai‘i 100th and the mainly Hawai‘i 442nd, which absorbed the 100th, were sent to Europe. The men fought there with conspicuous valor—“valor” in this case being a euphemism for an extreme disregard for personal safety in the enthusiastic service of killing Nazis. One soldier, Daniel Inouye, exhibited near-inconceivable levels of valor in Tuscany at the war’s end. When three German machine guns pinned his men down, he stood up to charge. He was immediately shot in the stomach, but he ran toward the first machine-gun nest and blew it up with a grenade. He then, in his words, “lurched up the hill” toward the second emplacement, dispatching it with two grenades. On his way toward the third nest, his last grenade in hand, a German rifle grenade hit his right elbow and “all but tore my arm off.” But his right fist, hanging now from “a few bloody shreds of tissue,” still clenched an armed grenade. He pried the grenade free with his left hand and hurled it into the third machine-gun nest. As the few surviving Germans ran out, Inouye unslung his tommy gun and, left-handed, sprayed them with machine-gun fire. It was only after getting shot again, in the leg, that he finally collapsed. “Get back up that hill!” he berated his comrades as they rushed to help him. “Nobody called off the war!”

Inouye lost the arm but won a Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration the United States bestows. In the Second World War, only four army divisions earned more than ten. The 100th/442nd, though a regiment—one-third the size of a division—earned twenty-one (twenty-two if you count Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid). It won thousands of other awards, too. Pound for pound, the 100th/442nd was one of the most decorated units in U.S. history.

The Roosevelt administration had already agreed with Britain on a “Germany first” strategy for the war, which meant prioritizing Europe. The acknowledged price of that strategy was letting Japan take the Philippines. Was the United States truly willing to see that happen? Churchill asked. The secretary of war, a former governor-general of the Philippines, reassured him: “There are times when men have to die.”

The 37th handled most of the combat in Manila. On February 9, six days into the battle, it saw nineteen of its men killed and more than two hundred wounded. That was nothing compared with the thousands of Filipinos who were being daily slaughtered, but to Beightler it was “alarming.” The division reverted to its tried-and-true tactic. Rather than engage Iwabuchi’s men in direct combat, it would simply destroy any buildings in which they might be hiding. “Putting it crudely, we really went to town,” Beightler reported. “To me, the loss of a single American life to save a building was unthinkable.” That’s a sentence worth reading twice. In Beightler’s mind, he was facing a trade-off—and not a particularly difficult one—between lives and architecture. But, as he well knew, those buildings were inhabited. Some by enemy soldiers, of course, but many by civilians. Those civilians were “Americans,” too, even if no one treated them that way.

The “better to lose a building than an American life” logic succeeded in protecting mainland soldiers. In the month of fighting, 1,010 of them died. Compare that with the 16,665 Japanese troops who perished. And compare that with the 100,000 Manilans killed. For every “American life” lost, 100 Manilans died.

The Second World War in the Philippines rarely appears in history textbooks. But it should. It was by far the most destructive event ever to take place on U.S. soil.

The counter-entropic side of the war was the less glamorous side. Think of a GI, and you’re more likely to imagine a soldier on the front lines than a construction worker. But in the case of the United States, the construction worker is the better mental image. During the war, fewer than one in ten U.S. service members ever saw a shot fired in anger. For most who served, the war wasn’t about combat. It was about logistics.

And they were. Buoyed by much-needed U.S. supplies, the British Eighth Army struck back at the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, pouring fire into Rommel’s position. “I have seen many enemy barrages,” recorded one terrified driver behind German lines, “but the intensity of this one is beyond our experience.” Just as the British pushed Rommel out of Egypt into Tunisia, three mighty fleets collectively containing seven hundred ships landed on African shores with the necessaries to expel the Axis from Africa entirely within six months. Britain’s lifeline to its empire was saved. “It marked in fact the turning of the ‘Hinge of Fate,’” Churchill wrote. “It may almost be said, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.’” The campaign also transformed the Middle East, converting it into what the secretary of state called a “tremendous supply base” for the Allies. Factories in Palestine made batteries, those in Iran made antifreeze, and canning plants in Egypt produced rations for the troops. The northern half of Africa, which had been a virtual terra incognita for the United States, hummed with U.S. bases, ports, assembly plants, barracks, and warehouses.

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.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As president he left the continental United States twenty-one times, and all but one of those times he journeyed beyond the borders of the Greater United States. He visited Canada, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Haiti, Colombia, Panama, Trinidad, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Newfoundland, Morocco, Gambia, Liberia, Mexico, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Iran, Malta, Italy, Senegal, and the Soviet Union—some of them multiple times. He was the first president to set foot in South America, Africa, or Asia while in office. He wasn’t

Simply put, World War II made the United States a planetary presence. State Department officials furiously churned out wartime memos establishing U.S. policy—often for the first time—regarding every nation, colony, region, and sub-duchy on the map. One

That word MacLeish chose, global, was new. There are scattered instances of its use to refer to the world starting in the nineteenth century, but not many before the 1940s. It took the war to make it popular.

Finally, MacArthur had a task that matched his sense of self. Simultaneously, he led the Japanese occupation, the U.S. military’s Far East Command, and the U.S. Army in the Far East. Later, while still holding all those positions, he would also take command of the United Nations forces in the Korean War. Though officially he answered to Washington and to the Allies’ Far Eastern Commission, in actuality MacArthur had, as he put it, “absolute control over almost 80-million people.”

Somehow, in the anything-goes atmosphere of the occupation, a twenty-two-year-old Jewish woman named Beate Sirota had made it onto the constitutional drafting committee (she had spent part of her childhood in Tokyo and was one of the few whites who spoke Japanese fluently). It was largely owing to her influence that the constitution mandated equal rights within marriage and prohibited sex discrimination—things that the U.S. constitution conspicuously does not do. That is still Japan’s constitution today. In more than sixty years, it hasn’t been amended once.

In 1940 its colonized population had made up about 13 percent of the Greater United States. Now, adding it all up—the colonies and occupations—yielded a much larger total. The overseas area under U.S. jurisdiction contained some 135 million people. That was, remarkably, more than the 132 million who inhabited the mainland.

In late 1945, counting the occupations, 51 percent of the population of the Greater United States lived outside the states. But by 1960, after Hawai‘i and Alaska entered the union, that number had fallen to around 2 percent, which is roughly where it has been ever since. Today, all U.S. overseas territory, including base sites, comprises an area smaller than Connecticut.

In 1940 nearly one out of every three individuals on the planet was colonized. By 1965, it was down to one in fifty.

In August 1945 the War Department announced that it would need 2.5 million men for the coming year. Planes and ships could be used to command the seas and the air. But to run occupations and put down rebellions? You needed an army for that. The problem was, the army had to agree. Marshall’s plan to keep men overseas provoked a furious reaction. Families of servicemen blasted their representatives with letters and buried congressional offices in baby shoes, all bearing tags reading BRING DADDY HOME. On a single day in December, Truman’s office estimated that it had received sixty thousand postcards demanding the troops’ return. Politicians, fearing electoral consequences, pulled strings. As they did, the army emptied out. “At the rate we are demobilizing troops,” warned Truman, “in a very short time we will have no means with which to enforce our demands.” Worried about the “disintegration of our armed forces” being carried out at “dangerous speed,” Truman ordered a slowdown in January 1946. Troops would stay overseas, even if there were ships ready to take them back. This was, for many, the last straw. Days after Truman’s announcement, twenty thousand GIs marched in Manila and gathered at the ruins of the Legislative Building. They wanted to go home, of course—that was the main thing, and for some the only thing. Yet others, including the leaders, had seen the Asian Spring firsthand and objected strenuously to being kept around to suppress it. “Let us leave the Chinese and...

The Manila protest set off a string of others. Twenty thousand soldiers protested in Honolulu, three thousand in Korea, five thousand in Calcutta. On Guam, the men burned the secretary of war in effigy, and more than three thousand sailors staged a hunger strike. Protests erupted in China, Burma, Japan, France, Germany, Britain, and Austria, too, with supporting demonstrations in Washington, Chicago, and New York.

Such racism had long held Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood at bay, but global decolonization changed things. “Can America lead the world—effectively—toward its principle of government by consent of the governed, when it retains its own obsolete colonialism in Alaska and Hawaii?” Ernest Gruening asked. Or, as he asked privately, “How can we fervently plead for self-determination etc. for Indonesia and every other G-string people when we deny the most elementary expression of self government to our own?”

Southern opposition stymied Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood through the forties and fifties, but it could not hold out forever. Well-known among the civil rights movement’s triumphs are the desegregation of schools won in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the prohibition of racial discrimination at the polls secured by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less touted in the textbooks are the admission of Alaska and Hawai‘i as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states in 1959. But those, too, were serious blows against racism. For the first time, the logic of white supremacy had not dictated which parts of the Greater United States were eligible for statehood.

Puerto Rico is central to the history of contraceptives. Yet contraceptives are not central to the history of Puerto Rico. By the late 1950s, the island had “one of the most extensive systems of birth control clinics in the world,” a study found. That same study, however, noted that Puerto Ricans had “a fairly low tolerance for modern contraceptive methods” and used them so irregularly, infrequently, and incorrectly that the effect on population growth was “minimal.” Why did contraceptives fare so poorly in Puerto Rico despite the boundless zeal of birth control advocates? Surely, social stigma was part of the story. But another part was the aggressive promotion of a different form of birth control: female sterilization.

By 1949, a survey revealed that 18 percent of all hospital deliveries were followed by “la operación.” No governmental program championed sterilization. The advocates were doctors themselves, both mainlanders and locals. Worried that Puerto Ricans lacked the education to use other methods of birth control, they steered their patients toward the surgical procedure. Sometimes, hospitals offered it free.

In 1965 a governmental survey found that more than a third of Puerto Rican mothers between the ages of twenty and forty-nine had been sterilized, at the median age of twenty-six. Of the mothers born in the latter part of the 1920s, nearly half had been sterilized.

But the Puerto Rican Great Migration was strikingly female—in the half decade after World War II it was 59 percent so. That was partly because foreign women had a harder time crossing U.S. borders, which left an opening for Puerto Rican women, often in domestic service. But it also owed to the encouragement of the island government, which was eager to see the departure of women of childbearing age. Many did leave. In 1950 about one in seven Puerto Ricans lived not on the island, but on the mainland. By 1955, it was closer to one in four.

If the politics of Puerto Rico’s new status was ambiguous, the economics was clear. A loophole in the tax code exempted corporations from federal taxes if they were based primarily in the territories. It was one of the many legal anomalies resulting from the Insular Cases, which had denied the automatic extension of federal law to the unincorporated territories. Latching onto it, Muñoz Marín’s government turned Puerto Rico into a tax haven. Mainland corporations were enticed to move to the island with tax holidays, subsidies from the insular treasury, low-interest loans, and other aid. The island’s economy became more tightly linked than ever to that of the mainland.

The epic battle between Muñoz Marín and Albizu in the fifties transformed Puerto Rican society, but it barely registered elsewhere. If mainlanders think about Puerto Rican history in that period at all, the image that comes to their mind is an entirely different one: juvenile delinquency. Young Puerto Ricans didn’t actually commit many crimes in the postwar period. The evidence suggests that they misbehaved less than other New Yorkers. But as Puerto Ricans poured in from the island, the tabloid press trumpeted sensational tales of their malfeasance. Journalists who had had conspicuously little to say about the anticolonial uprising of 1950 were only too happy to sound off about Puerto Rican gangs, dope fiends, and switchblade artists.

Japan, worried about its own access to rubber and other critical raw materials, expanded its war beyond China and moved on to the resource-rich lands of Southeast Asia. Within months, it conquered the European colonies that accounted for 97 percent of the U.S. rubber supply. The United States and its allies were virtually cut off.

By the war’s end, nearly nine in ten pounds of U.S. rubber were factory-made, mostly from oil. This was, wrote an awed observer, “one of the most remarkable industrial achievements of all time.”

The replacement of colonial rubber with synthetic rubber was a sort of magic. Yet it wasn’t the only rabbit that chemists yanked from their hats. What’s extraordinary is how many raw materials the United States weaned itself off during the war. Silk, hemp, jute, camphor, cotton, wool, pyrethrum, gutta-percha, tin, copper, tung oil—for one after another, the United States found synthetic substitutes. Throughout its economy, it replaced colonies with chemistry. No synthetic illustrates this better than plastic.

The calculus was the same as for rubber. The Axis powers, Japan in particular, had cut the United States off from vital supplies. So the military sought to use plastic, made mostly from oil, as a substitute for any “strategic” material that could no longer be easily got. As much as it could, the war effort should run on plastic.

Between 1930 and 1950, the volume of plastics produced annually in the world grew fortyfold. By 2000, it had grown to nearly three thousand times its 1930 size.

This was the legacy of the Second World War. Take the world’s most advanced economy, cut it off from most tropical trade, and send it into overdrive—it was the perfect recipe for a synthetic revolution.

There was, of course, one exception: oil. Many of the chemistry-for-colonies exchanges the United States made, including synthetic rubber and plastic, involved substituting petroleum for other materials. In 1945, when 59 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves lay within U.S. borders, this gave the United States an extraordinary measure of self-sufficiency. But as those reserves got used and large ones opened in other countries, oil became increasingly foreign in provenance.

For every soldier overseas, the United States would ship sixty-seven pounds of matériel abroad per day. And unlike in the First World War, where the United States shipped to fourteen ports in one theater, now it serviced more than a hundred ports in eleven theaters. It’s telling that before the war started, logistics had been a specialist’s term, not much heard in general speech. The military academies exalted courage, leadership, and tactical acuity, not procurement and transportation. Yet, fairly soon into the Second World War, commanders grew accustomed to speaking of tonnage, inventory levels, and supply lines with the knowing reverence previously reserved for accounts of battlefield heroics.

The Second World War, it was clear from the start, would be different. When Hitler invaded Poland, his Luftwaffe had four thousand aircraft—a formidable threat that nearly broke Britain’s defenses. The United States, in response, began to build its own air fleet, putting its full industrial muscle behind the effort. At peak, U.S. plants churned out more than one plane every four minutes—a Luftwaffe every eleven days.

A decade or two earlier, this would have been unthinkable. The planes, for one, had been too small. The biggest planes in operation in World War I had been the German Riesenflugzeug (“giant aircraft”), most notably the Siemens-Schuckert planes, the largest of which could hold two and a half tons—the Germans had built six during the war. But by the end of the Second World War, the United States had produced nearly four thousand B-29 Superfortresses, each of which could carry twenty tons.

By the end of 1943, planes were touching down in Kunming once every eleven minutes. In a twenty-four-hour period in 1945, Tunner landed one every minute and twelve seconds.

Britain achieved its all-red network and, with it, invulnerability. Everyone else, meanwhile, learned the cost of not having a secure network. In the opening days of the First World War, Britain cut Germany’s transatlantic cables—something it could easily do, as Germany did not control the territory around them. The Germans were then forced to use unreliable intermediaries to carry their messages, which opened them up to espionage. In 1917 the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a proposal to Mexico promising to help Mexico “reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona” in exchange for an alliance. But the British intercepted the message and shared it with Washington. The “Zimmermann Telegram,” as it is now known, was crucial in drawing the United States into the war.

Aviation, knocked-down shipping, wireless communication, cryptography, chloroquine, DDT, and world-proofing. These were disparate technologies, but what united them was their effect on movement. They allowed the United States to move easily through foreign lands it didn’t control, substituting technology for territory.

The aircraft, departing from bases in western Germany, flew necessities: coal, oil, flour, dehydrated food, and salt. But they also flew grand pianos and, in one case, a power plant. Berlin’s economy ran by air. Stalin, ultimately, could not hold out—the blockade hurt him more than it hurt his adversaries. In the eleventh month, after more than a quarter of a million flights, he lifted the barriers. The lesson was clear: Stalin had territorial control, but that didn’t mean what it used to. It was a lesson Moscow would be taught repeatedly. Starting in the late forties, the United States started beaming radio broadcasts into the USSR and its satellites—the communications equivalent of the Berlin Airlift. A few high-powered broadcasting stations in Western Europe were all it took to shred the informational sovereignty of the Eastern Bloc. The Voice of America and two CIA-backed operations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation (later renamed Radio Liberty), egged on dissenters, incited uprisings, and aired governmental secrets. The Soviets tried to jam the broadcasts; by 1958, they were spending more on jamming than on their own transmissions. But they never managed to shut off the stream of information.

The Second World War left the United States in an extraordinary position. It was rich, it was powerful, and, thanks to its chemists and engineers, it had the means to deal with foreign lands without colonizing them. But the war also conferred another advantage, harder to see and operating on a deeper level. It had to do with standards.

The more we fill our lives with complex manufactured objects and the more those objects move around, the more important it is that they play well with one another. In 1904 a massive fire ravaged Baltimore. Engine companies sped from New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, and Harrisburg to help. Yet there was little they could do, for when they arrived, they found that their hoses couldn’t connect to Baltimore’s hydrants (or, indeed, to one another’s hoses). For thirty helpless hours they watched as 1,562 buildings burned.

College football was a popular sport in the 1920s, yet it wasn’t until 1940 that colleges agreed on what a “football” was. Home teams would just supply whatever vaguely football-shaped objects they wanted. Teams that liked to pass used slim balls, teams that emphasized kicking (which early football rules encouraged) proffered short and fat ones.

It wasn’t until 1927 that traffic lights were standardized. Before that, drivers in Manhattan stopped on green, started on yellow, and understood red to mean “caution.” A different system prevailed in Cleveland, a different one in Chicago, a different one in Buffalo, and so on.

Hoover’s animal companion was a cat, whom he addressed as Mr. Cat.

There’s a reason, in other words, that the British measurement system (feet, yards, gallons, pounds, tons) is called the imperial system. Those weights and measures were promulgated to secure commensurability throughout Britain’s realm, far beyond the British Isles. Even where local measures were used, they were defined in British terms, such as the Indian measure of mass called the maund, standardized in the nineteenth century to equal a hundred pounds.