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

by Daniel Immerwahr

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.

Franklin is best remembered for his experiments with electricity and his many inventions (bifocals, the lightning rod, the circulating stove, the urinary catheter), but his demographic research was a large part of his legacy, too. His numbers quickly made the rounds in Europe, only sometimes with his name attached, and entered the thought of such philosophers as Adam Smith and David Hume. The grim prediction by the economist Thomas Malthus that food supply could never keep pace with population growth was largely based on Franklin’s North American calculations (which, Malthus gasped, indicated “a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history”). Malthus, in turn, was an important influence on Charles Darwin, both of whose grandfathers knew Franklin well. The copy of Malthus’s book in Darwin’s library has the Franklin passages underlined.

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.

No, that man was suffering from a severe hookworm infestation. His pallor and posture were the result of anemia. Severely anemic people eat dirt or clay; they are hungry for iron. And the man could be cured “at a cost of about fifty cents.” “Good God! Stiles, are you in earnest?” Page exclaimed. Again, the veil lifted. Is that where the “lazy white Southerner” stereotype came from? Is that why Southern whites looked funny—lanky, pale, and slack?

It would be ideal except for the Porto Ricans—they are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians.

And when Fortune in 1940 asked its readers which “countries” the United States should use its military to protect, only a slight majority (55 percent) favored defending Hawai‘i itself, far fewer than the number who would defend Canada (74 percent).

But sentences of more than a year’s incarceration were rare, and there’s little reason to think that many languished in Hawai‘i’s prisons. Often, defendants were directed to donate blood in lieu of jail time or purchase war bonds instead of paying fines. In that way, the army compelled the people of Hawai‘i to engage in patriotic acts that, for mainlanders, were done by choice.

Would the Japanese in the Philippines side with Japan or the United States? Nearly unanimously, they chose Japan. The former internees, bearing guns provided by the Japanese army, took swift and brutal revenge on those who had locked them up. They then served the Japanese occupation as intermediaries and interpreters. Filipinos got used to seeing familiar faces—the gardener, the ice-cream peddler, the house servant—parading in Japanese military uniforms. “Words cannot describe the seriousness of the dilemma faced by the Japanese residents as we found ourselves caught between the brutality of the Japanese military and the misery of our Filipino friends,” Osawa remembered. Nevertheless, he joined the occupation government and served it throughout the war. Despite his “assimilation into Philippine society,” he still felt a “fierce pride of being Japanese.”

The twin Pacific campaigns were long and brutal, and it’s telling that many veterans of the war who went on to political greatness earned their spurs in them. John F. Kennedy got shipwrecked in the Solomons (an island there is named after him). Lyndon Baines Johnson won a Silver Star, personally given by MacArthur, for “gallantry” as an observer in New Guinea. Richard Nixon served in air logistics in MacArthur’s theater. Gerald Ford gamely puttered around nearly every island group in the ocean on a light aircraft carrier. The twenty-year-old Lieutenant George H. W. Bush was shot down over Chichi Jima in the Bonins. Bush—the plane’s sole survivor—got rescued by a submarine. He was extremely lucky. Four other airmen shot down later in the same area were captured and became the unfortunate victims in the highest-profile documented instance of Japanese wartime cannibalism.

The overseas area under U.S. jurisdiction contained some 135 million people. That was, remarkably, more than the 132 million who inhabited the mainland.