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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Hoover was an astonishingly capable bureaucrat. And there was little he cared about as much as standardization.

Herbert Hoover, as a man, can best be understood as the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt. Whereas Roosevelt lusted for combat and styled himself as a cowboy, Hoover was a Quaker who had lived for a year among Osages in Indian Country (he later had Charles Curtis, a Native American with Osage heritage, as his vice president). Roosevelt chafed at rules; Hoover once refused to let former president Benjamin Harrison into a college baseball game without a ticket. Roosevelt gave his horse the dramatic name Rain-in-the-Face; Hoover’s animal companion was a cat, whom he addressed as Mr. Cat. And whereas Roosevelt had a lifelong obsession with big game hunting, Hoover’s love was fishing, an activity he revered for its “quieting of hate,” “hushing to ambition,” and promotion of “meekness.”

the true problem with the economy was neither the injustice of capitalists nor the impatience of workers, but the inefficiency of objects. So much time and money were wasted on things that just didn’t work. Solve that problem, Hoover thought, and there’d be more than enough to go around. Standardizing and simplifying were, in his mind, the keys to prosperity. When he took his position as secretary, he rearranged the Commerce Department to ensure that he’d supervise the Bureau of Standards personally.

By exporting its standards, Harry Truman noted, the United States was “smoothing the flow of international trade” and “enabling buyers and sellers in different nations to speak the same language.” He didn’t need to specify whose language was spoken.

Still, the United States has refused to relinquish its inches, pounds, and gallons. It stands with Myanmar, Liberia, the Independent State of Samoa, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands as the sole holdouts against the metric system.

Languages are standards, just like stop signs and screw threads, but they run much deeper. Languages shape thought, making some ideas more readily thinkable and others less so. At the same time, they shape societies. Which languages you speak affects which communities you join, which books you read, which places you feel at home. That a single language has become the dominant tongue on the planet, spoken to a degree by nearly all educated and powerful people, is thus an occurrence of profound consequence. It is particularly astonishing because there is no historical precedent for it.

In 1949 the United Nations General Assembly resolved that member states should teach primary and secondary students in their native languages. That year, Mao Zedong took power in China; his Cultural Revolution would prohibit English and make English-language teachers targets of violence. In the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union sought to ban English as a “decadent” subject and to promote Russian throughout its realm.

How did English prevail? In the forties, FDR and Churchill expected that they’d have to drastically alter English to turn it into a global language. Decolonization, by placing men like Manuel Quezon in power, only worsened English’s prospects. Yet English surmounted these obstacles and became a true world language. How?

They did that in large part through education. The hundreds of thousands of foreign students streaming into U.S. universities (120,000 a year by 1969) didn’t just study math and sociology. They studied math and sociology in English. They then carried English back to their home countries, where they ranked among the most educated and powerful. Add to those students the nearly half a million foreign military trainees who studied at U.S. military academies, schools, bases, and special facilities. While students rushed in, English oozed out.

Standards reflect power, but the real compulsion rarely comes from the state. It comes, rather, from the community.

Sony hadn’t been compelled to give up on Betamax, exactly. It’s just that the cost of sticking with it had become prohibitively high. Too many people had already chosen VHS. Something similar has happened in language. As distant cultures have come into closer contact, the need for common tongues has grown. Yet which language to use hasn’t exactly been a free choice for everyone. You pick the language others have chosen, the language you think will get you the furthest. And once a critical mass has been reached, that choice becomes practically mandatory.

The first group to fully go in for English was the air traffic controllers. Aviation, being technically complex and profoundly international, is an area where standards are vital. A common language is especially so, given the paramount importance of clear communication in the skies. In

The next group to go in for English was the scientists.

The most powerful force for anglicization has been the internet. It has promoted international communication, but it has set English proficiency as the price.

The dominance of English on the internet is, in a way, the result of free choices. No government commanded it, no army enforces it. Yet many who have chosen to work in English have done so reluctantly, in the way a Betamax fan might bow to inevitability and purchase a VHS system. They use English because there is no other viable choice. “It is the ultimate act of intellectual colonialism,” sighed the director of an internet provider in Russia.

Air traffic controllers, then scientists, then internet users. As each increasingly large technical community adopted English, the momentum grew. Whole countries—some containing hundreds of millions of people who have never attended a scientific conference and may not even use the internet often—were dragged into the vortex. This process now appears inexorable, but it took a while to become so. In 1969 a prominent linguist at Columbia University noted that a world language was probably inevitable.

The U.S. military was the largest and one of the most exacting standard-setting agencies on the planet. Producing for it was like having a well-paid internship: lucrative in the moment but also conferring skills that would prove extremely valuable later.

Sony’s first transistor radio, introduced in 1955, wasn’t the world’s first—a U.S. firm had beat it to the market. But Sony’s radios were the ones that sold. And starting with the 1957 model, they sold in the United States.

Sony wasn’t just selling a radio, it was selling a new way to consume media. Young listeners could now tune in without adult supervision (a teenage John Lennon had a transistor radio on display, the Beatles chronicler Bob Spitz has written, “like priceless art in his bedroom”). To the degree that we live in a world of pocket-size personal devices rather than one of large screens and subwoofers, we have Sony to thank. Or blame.

In the sixties, the “British Invasion” reversed the cultural flow of rock music. Starting with the Beatles, British musicians who had mastered rock and blues made their way to the United States: the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, the Who, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison, and Led Zeppelin. Whatever first-mover advantage artists such as Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry used to enjoy had clearly expired, as the British bands could dominate the charts just as easily.

Foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations, pinpoint strikes, networks, planes, and drones—these are the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on terror. This is the shape of power today. This is the world the United States made.

“Recognize that we Puerto Ricans are American citizens,” the island’s governor pleaded. Yet a poll taken after Maria found that only a slight majority of mainlanders (and only 37 percent of those under thirty) knew that fact.

There are about four million people living in the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either. More than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, they remain disenfranchised. As Guamanians and Puerto Ricans have recently seen, this disenfranchisement carries potentially lethal consequences.

Territory still matters today. Colonialism hovers in the background of politics at the highest level. McCain, Palin, Obama, and Trump have all been touched by it. That may seem like an odd and surprising fact. But we should get over our surprise. The history of the United States is the history of empire.