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

by Daniel Immerwahr

“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 the...

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.”

“Most people in this country, including educated people, know little or nothing about our overseas possessions,” concluded a governmental report written during World War II. “As a matter of fact, a lot of people do not know that we have overseas possessions. They are convinced that only ‘foreigners,’ such as the British, have an ‘empire.’ Americans are sometimes amazed to hear that we, too, have an ‘empire.’”

The case can be made in a number of ways. The dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations was pretty transparently imperialist. Then, in the 1840s, the United States fought a war with Mexico and seized a third of it. Fifty years later, it fought a war with Spain and claimed the bulk of Spain’s overseas territories.

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.

Another part has to do with technology. 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.

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.

The same pattern held in Louisiana Territory, the land Jefferson acquired in 1803 from France. Eastern politicians fretted about the newly annexed land’s inhabitants: Anglo settlers, Catholics, free blacks, Indians, and mixed-race folk. “This Constitution never was, and never can be, strained to lap over all the wilderness of the West,” warned Representative Josiah Quincy, the future president of Harvard.

Rather than putting Louisiana through the normal Northwest Ordinance procedures, Jefferson added a new initial phase, military government, and sent the U.S. Army to keep the peace. By 1806, the Territory of Louisiana hosted the largest contingent of the army in the country.

The population of France at the time of U.S. independence was around thirty million. In 1900 it was slightly more than forty million. By contrast, the population of the United States at its independence was between three and four million—roughly one-tenth the size of France. And yet by 1900 it was seventy-six million, nearly twice France’s size.

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.”

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.”

In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.

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.

“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 (barely a month later, the USS Oregon’s coal stores spontaneously burst into flame). Whatever the cause, McKinley was loath to ramp up the conflict with Spain. “I have been through one war,” he said, thinking of his service in the Civil War. “I have seen the dead piled up. I do not want to see another.” Roosevelt rolled his eyes. “McKinley is bent on peace, I fear.”

“The term ‘United States of America’ has ceased to be an accurate description of the countries over which the Stars and Stripes float,” the author of one argued. “Like ‘United Kingdom,’ it applies merely to the central and dominating body, the seat of empire; and Greater America comprises almost as wide a range of governments as Greater Britain itself.”

Although the country’s official name has always been the United States of America, in the nineteenth century it was common to call it the United States, or perhaps refer to it by its political structure: the Republic or the Union. Though inhabitants of the country were often called Americans, it is striking how infrequently America was used.

“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. “One might, up to that annus mirabilis, have travelled five thousand miles and read a hundred books and newspapers without ever having once come across it; ‘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.

Theodore Roosevelt, spoke of America in his first annual message and never looked back. In one two-week period, Roosevelt used the name more than all his predecessors combined had. Every president since has used America freely and frequently. The anthems changed, too: no longer “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” but “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America.”

It’s true that the United States had been annexing territory for nearly a century. But there was something different about the post-1898 acquisitions. It wasn’t the land. It was the people who lived on it.

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?”

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.”

“It is one thing to admit scattered communities of white, or nearly white, men into the rights of citizenship,” one writer put it, “but quite a different matter to act in the same way with a closely packed and numerous brown people.” Or as the skeptical Speaker of the House put it, less politely, “I s’posed we had niggers enough in this country without buyin’ any more of ’em.”

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.

Five months later, Wilson virtually reenacted the plot of The Birth of a Nation by sending the marines to the black republic of Haiti to wrest control from the “unstable” government. The occupation lasted through the rest of Wilson’s presidency—and didn’t end until 1934.

The Japanese delegation asked to at least insert language about racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. This proposal had a majority of votes behind it—the French delegation deemed the cause “indisputable.” But Wilson blocked it, refusing to let even the principle of racial equality stand.

During the war, the military tested its gases and gear on more than sixty thousand of its own men. These tests were secret. They rarely appeared on service records, and participants were firmly instructed never to speak of them. By and large, the men complied. Although many suffered debilitating aftereffects—cancer, lung disease, eye problems, skin abnormalities, psychological damage, scarred genitals—the extent of the program remained unknown until the 1990s. Some participants told their families only on their deathbeds. After the revelation of the tests themselves came another revelation: some of the experiments were race based. African Americans, Japanese Americans, and Puerto Ricans were tested to see if they would fare differently than whites against mustard agents.

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. It was, an expert in the 1930s declared, “infinitely more self-contained” than its rivals.

What the Depression drove home was that, three decades after the war with Spain, the United States still hadn’t done much with its empire. The colonies had their uses: as naval bases and zones of experimentation for men such as Daniel Burnham and Cornelius Rhoads. But colonial products weren’t integral to the U.S. economy.

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

The United States then interned thousands of “liberated” Guamanians, over their objections, in camps while the navy tore down what remained of the capital to build a military base. It was yet another occasion when the United States interned its own people during the war.

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.

Oscar Villadolid, a boy at the time, remembers a familiar scene from the aftermath of Manila’s “liberation.” A GI came down his street handing out cigarettes and Hershey bars. Speaking slowly, he asked Villadolid’s name. When Villadolid replied easily in English, the soldier was startled. “How’d ya learn American?” he asked. Villadolid explained that when the United States colonized the Philippines, it had instituted English in the schools. This only compounded the GI’s confusion. “He did not even know that America had a colony here in the Philippines!” Villadolid marveled. Take a moment to let that sink in. This was a soldier who had taken a long journey across the Pacific. He’d been briefed on his mission, shown maps, told where to go and whom to shoot. Yet at no point had it dawned on him that he was preparing to save a U.S. colony and that the people he would encounter there were, just like him, U.S. nationals. He thought he was invading a foreign country.

Presidents, too, began to move as 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.

The stationary presidency ended abruptly with 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.

Japan wasn’t a U.S. territory like the Philippines. But MacArthur nevertheless ran it as if it were. The Japanese flag was prohibited, and the Stars and Stripes rose in its place. Streets and places got new names: Washington Heights, Roosevelt Recreation Area, Doolittle Park (named, awkwardly, after the first man to bomb Tokyo). “Parts of Tokyo look as Oriental as Peoria, Illinois,” a journalist observed.

When Japanese politicians failed to write a constitution to MacArthur’s satisfaction, he had one drafted, in English, in nine days. “We the Japanese people,” it starts, and it goes on to affirm individuals’ rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But though

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.

Nineteen fifty-nine was the year of statehood. The next year, 1960, a Kenyan student met a Kansan one in the Russian class at the University of Hawaii. The two married—an interracial marriage illegal in two dozen states at the time—and had a son, who would grow up partly in Hawai‘i, partly in Indonesia. In typical Hawaiian fashion, his profoundly multiracial extended family would grow by marriage to incorporate African American, British, Lithuanian, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Chinese elements. And in 2009 that son, Barack Obama, would become the first black president of the United States.

“How little the American people know of Puerto Rico!” Collazo exclaimed in frustration during his trial. He doubted if one in a hundred could place it on a map. “They don’t know Puerto Rico is a possession of the United States, even though it has been so for the last fifty-two years.”

Puerto Rico was still poorer than any state in the union and poorer than Mexico—hence the stream of migrants to the mainland—but it was doing better than nearly all its Caribbean neighbors. In 1954, Life, which had labeled the island an “unsolvable problem” just eleven years earlier, described it as “one of the few spots on the globe that all Americans can feel happy and hopeful about these days.”

They have largely stayed forgotten. Despite his extraordinary career, Pedro Albizu Campos is hard to find in surveys of U.S. history.

West Side Story. That musical, written by Arthur Laurents with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, premiered in 1957, three years after the House shooting. It was first conceived as a Romeo-and-Juliet story about a Jewish woman and a Catholic man (flying initially under the unappetizing title Gang Bang). But the creative team, seeking relevance, swapped out the Jews for Puerto Ricans. Sondheim was nervous. “I can’t do this show,” he protested at first. “I’ve never even known a Puerto Rican.”

The new drugs and sprays not only made war safer, they made movement safer. No longer were areas like Panama graveyards for mainlanders, the sorts of places to which they’d bring their coffins in their luggage. In fact, during the war the United States established 134 bases in Panama outside the carefully policed Canal Zone. Those bases were partly to protect the canal, but they also served as places to practice maneuvers and experiment with chemical weapons, such as the jungle tests Cornelius Rhoads oversaw.

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.

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’s easy to ignore standards. But once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere. You realize how much relies on the silent coordination of extremely complex processes. And you start to earnestly wonder how society can go a day without bridges collapsing, planes dropping from the sky, appliances spontaneously exploding, and everything good burning up in a swelling ball of flame.