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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Yet a similar logic held in 1941. 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 (whereas the Philippines was provisionally on track for independence). Yet even when it came to Hawai‘i, Roosevelt felt a need to massage the point. Though the territory had a substantial white population, nearly three-quarters of its inhabitants were Asians or Pacific Islanders. Roosevelt clearly worried that his audience might regard Hawai‘i as foreign. So on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the “island of Oahu,” but the “American island of Oahu.” Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to “American naval and military forces,” and “very many American lives” had been lost. An American island, where American lives were lost—that was the point he was trying to make. If the Philippines was being rounded down to foreign, Hawai‘i was being rounded up to “American.” “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan” is how Roosevelt’s speech began. Note that in this formulation Japan is an “emp...

Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam—it wasn’t easy to know how to think about such places or even what to call them. At the turn of the twentieth century, when many were acquired (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawai‘i, Wake), their status was clear. They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson unabashedly called them, colonies. Yet that spirit of forthright imperialism didn’t last. Within a decade or two, after passions had cooled, the c-word became taboo. “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.

But if places like the Philippines and Puerto Rico were territories, they were territories of a different sort. Unlike the western territories, they weren’t obviously slated for statehood. Nor were they widely understood to be integral parts of the nation.

Even the world atlases were confusing. Rand McNally’s wartime Ready Reference Atlas of the World, like many other atlases at the time, listed Hawai‘i, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as “foreign.” A class of seventh-grade girls at the Western Michigan College Training School in Kalamazoo scratched their heads over this. They’d been trying to follow the war on their maps. How, they wondered, could the attack on Pearl Harbor have been an attack on the United States if Hawai‘i was foreign? They wrote to Rand McNally to inquire. “Although Hawaii belongs to the United States, it is not an integral part of this country,” the publisher replied. “It is foreign to our continental shores, and therefore cannot logically be shown in the United States proper.” The girls were not satisfied. Hawai‘i is not an integral part of this country? “We believe this statement is not true,” they wrote. It is “an alibi instead of an explanation.” Further, they continued, “we feel that the Rand McNally atlas is misleading and a good cause for the people of outlying possessions to be embarrassed and disturbed.” The girls forwarded the correspondence to the Department of the Interior (in whose archives I found it) and asked for adjudication. Of course, the seventh-graders were right. As an official clarified, Hawai‘i was, indeed, part of the United States.

Indians regarded these squatters with horror. “No matter how little is left the red man, such heartless wretches will never rest content or let the Government rest until the Indians are made landless and homeless,” warned The Cherokee Advocate. “It is beyond the power of words to express the character of such men—dead to all human feeling and knowing no law.”

His unit complete, Roosevelt set out for Cuba. He traveled with two horses, his black manservant (“the most faithful and loyal of men”), a revolver that had been pulled from the wreck of the Maine, and his copy of Edmond Demolins’s book Anglo-Saxon Superiority. The regiment

easily diluted: a sprinkler in a rainstorm. This was no accident. The Mexican War of 1846–48 had ended with U.S. forces occupying Mexico City. Some in Congress proposed taking all of Mexico. From a military perspective, that was entirely feasible. But South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, one of the nation’s prime defenders of slavery, objected. “We have never dreamt of incorporating into the Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race,” he insisted on the Senate floor. “Are we to associate with ourselves, as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed races of Mexico?” Apparently not. 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.”

The usual reluctance to incorporate nonwhite peoples (it would be a “pigmy State of the Union,” scoffed the Chicago Herald) could no longer hold in the face of the argument that Dewey required Hawai‘i to control the Pacific. “We ought to take Hawaii, in the interests of the White race,” Roosevelt pressed. And so, over the protests of Native Hawaiians, more than thirty-eight thousand of whom had signed anti-annexation petitions, the United States seized the islands.

Unmastered forests must be felled.” The imperialists offered a different solution to the trilemma. They were willing to sacrifice republicanism, at least as applied to so-called backward races. Roosevelt scorned those “who cant about ‘liberty’ and the ‘consent of the governed,’ in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men.” He continued: “Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States.” There was, of course, a third option: jettison white supremacy. The overseas territories could be treated as embryonic states and their inhabitants as full citizens. This solution commanded a great deal of enthusiasm within the territories themselves, where political parties in Puerto Rico and the Philippines inserted demands for statehood into their platforms. With the western continental territories in mind, they imagined their countries, in time, entering the union as equals. Yet mainland support for this was scant. When the prospect of statehood came up, it did so mainly as a scare tactic—a way for anti-imperialists to underscore the horrors resulting from annexing these places.

The whirlwind also took the form of General Jacob Smith. He had fought the Lakota at Wounded Knee and adopted a similarly unyielding approach to Filipinos. “I want no prisoners,” Smith allegedly told his subordinate. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.” All rice was to be seized, Smith insisted, and any male over the age of ten who did not turn himself over to the U.S. government should be killed. “The interior of Samar,” he ordered, “must be made a howling wilderness.”

That Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner, would seek to roll back empires made sense. His sympathy for the colonized was no doubt fueled by his anger at how the North had treated what Wilson called its “conquered possessions”—the former Confederate states—after the Civil War. But there was another, darker side to Wilson’s Southern identity. He was not just a son of the South in general, but the son of a Southern pastor who had defended slavery by writing a pamphlet titled Mutual Relation of Masters and Slaves as Taught in the Bible. It was a worldview that Wilson never entirely shook off. As president of Princeton, he stood against admitting black students. As president of the United States, he looked on with approval as his cabinet members segregated large parts of the federal government. Wilson didn’t think of nonwhites as subhuman, as some around him did. But he regarded many of them as “children,” requiring “training” before they could rule themselves. The nightmare scenario, in his mind, was that the children might gain power they weren’t ready to wield. He thought of the former slaves who had risen to political office immediately after the Civil War. It was a time, Wilson wrote, when the “white men of the South” lay “under the negroes’ heels.” This was a catastrophe, a “veritable overthrow of civilization.” As he saw it, the brief participation of African Americans in politics had left a wound “incomparably deeper, incomparably more difficult to undo” than the war itself had.

Unlike Britain and France, the United States had few colonial careerists. Its officials tended to come and go quickly, seeing the territories as hardship posts that might lead to higher office back home—as quickly as possible, they hoped. Still, once in a while, someone slipped into the role of sahib and played it to pith-hatted perfection. In the Philippines, that someone was Cameron Forbes. He delighted in life in the tropics: the exotic Orient, the attentive servants, the languid lifestyle. He loved Filipinos, too, though he loved them, as the nationalist leader Manuel Quezon observed, “in the same way the former slave owners loved their Negro slaves.”

new center. He fixed on the Luneta, a cleared area near the water, where musicians played in the evenings. This, moved a thousand feet to the west and surrounded by governmental buildings, could serve as Manila’s command center. Broad avenues would radiate outward from it, cutting diagonally through the street grid. Why? “Because every section of the Capitol City should look with deference toward the symbol of the Nation’s power,” Burnham explained. Burnham sought to impress on Filipinos the authority of the colonial government. Yet he was ultimately less concerned with Philippine opinion than with the needs of mainlanders. So, though he had little to say about the many neighborhoods that had been torched or shot up in the previous years (other than to imagine carving boulevards through them), he fretted at length about Manila’s lack of a world-class hotel. He