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

by Daniel Immerwahr

What if Roosevelt’s audience didn’t care that Japan had attacked the Philippines or Guam? Polls taken slightly before the attack show that few in the continental United States supported a military defense of those remote territories.

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.”

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.”

Subtext here is that American = white

“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.

What this map shows is the country’s full territorial extent: the “Greater United States,”

The logo map excludes all that—large colonies and pinprick islands alike. And there is something else misleading about it. It suggests that the United States is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily entered into, of states standing on equal footing with one another. But that’s not true, and it’s never been true. From the day the treaty securing independence from Britain was ratified, right up to the present, it’s been a collection of states and territories. It’s been a partitioned country, divided into two sections, with different laws applying in each.

What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to U.S. history than is usually supposed. It hasn’t just been about black and white, but about Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Chamoru (from Guam), too, among other identities. Race has not only shaped lives, it’s shaped the country itself—where the borders went, who has counted as “American.” Once you look beyond the logo map, you see a whole new set of struggles over what it means to inhabit the United States.

The United States proper wasn’t a legal term, but census officials expected that everyone would understand. They justified this by claiming “obvious differences” between people in the overseas territories and those on the mainland.

Read: race

“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.’”

Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t a lack of knowledge. The libraries contain literally thousands of books about U.S. overseas territory. The problem is that those books have been sidelined—filed, so to speak, on the wrong shelves. They’re there, but so long as we’ve got the logo map in our heads, they’ll seem irrelevant. They’ll seem like books about foreign countries.

This book aims to show what U.S. history would look like if the “United States” meant the Greater United States, not the logo map.

In the end, this book’s main contribution is not archival, bringing to light some never-before-seen document. It’s perspectival, seeing a familiar history differently.

The history of the Greater United States, as I’ve come to view it, can be told in three acts. The first is westward expansion: the pushing west of national borders and the displacement of Native Americans.

The second act takes place off the continent, and it’s striking how quickly it begins. Just three years after filling out the shape of the logo map, the United States started annexing new territory overseas.

This is the third act, and it raises a question. Why did the United States, at the peak of its power, distance itself from colonial empire? I explore that question at length because it’s tremendously important yet seldom asked.

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.

Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.

None of this, however—not the large colonies, small islands, or military bases—has made much of a dent on the mainland mind. One of the truly distinctive features of the United States’ empire is how persistently ignored it has been.

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.

This self-image of the United States as a republic is consoling, but it’s also costly. Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies, in the occupation zones, and around the military bases.

At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.

The overseas parts of the United States have triggered wars, brought forth inventions, raised up presidents, and helped define what it means to be “American.” Only by including them in the picture do we see a full portrait of the country—not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.

Boone wasn’t exactly the “first white man of the West,” as one of his biographers insisted. But he was an early drop from a faucet that was about to be turned on full blast.

Part of the objection was social; the founders were men of culture and sophistication who found rough frontier life troubling.

Same vibe as rich white looking down on poor white

To realize their vision, the founders created a distinct political category for the frontier: territory. The revolution had been fought by a union of states, but those states’ borders became ill-defined and even overlapped as they reached westward. Rather than dividing the frontier among the states, the republic’s leaders brokered deals by which none of the Atlantic states would extend to the Mississippi, which marked the western edge of the country. Instead, western land would go to the federal government. It would be administered not as states, but as territories.

Jefferson understood the sentiment. The people of Louisiana were as “incapable of self-government as children,” he judged, adding that the “principles of popular Government are utterly beyond their comprehension.” 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.

In his more fanciful moments, Jefferson imagined the United States spreading to “cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws.” Yet that vague fantasy was slated, in Jefferson’s mind, for “distant times.”

You could see it in the cities the settlers built. Cincinnati, a village in 1810, had a nine-story steam-powered mill by 1815 and a fleet of 150 steamboats by 1830. Chicago grew from a settlement of fewer than a hundred people (and fourteen taxpayers) in 1830 to a towering megalopolis with the world’s first dense cluster of skyscrapers and more than a million residents in 1890—despite having burned to the ground in 1871.

The territories with large white populations became states swiftly;

The culture changed, too. Rather than being despised “banditti” or “white savages” on the fringes of civilization, settlers acquired a new identity: pioneers. No longer scofflaws, they were the proud flag-bearers of a dynamic nation.

A bastion of Indian strength was the Cherokee Nation, whose land stretched across parts of Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia. Cherokee numbers had fallen, perhaps by as much as half, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the population started rebounding in the early nineteenth.

In 1828 the state of Georgia declared the Cherokee constitution invalid and demanded the Cherokees’ land.

Just wtf

Jackson sweetened the pot. Within Indian Country, his administration proposed to designate a smaller-but-still-really-large area, somewhere between the size of California and Texas, as Western Territory. This would be an organized territory, governed by a confederacy of Indian polities and given a delegate in Congress. The goal, as the government’s representative explained, was that Western Territory would be “admitted as a state to become a member of the Union.”

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.”

In the end, the thought of a “full-blood savage” with a desk in the Capitol proved too much for the delicate sensibilities of the members of the 23rd Congress.

Heaven forbid ugh

“The question will suggest itself,” wrote an aghast federal agent who witnessed it all: “Which of these people are the savages?”

Indian Country was successively whittled down until it had been reduced to its southern tip, present-day Oklahoma. The territory’s population, drawn from all over the map, spoke to the wrenching dislocations of the nineteenth century. By 1879, it contained Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Quapaws, Seminoles, Senecas, Shawnees, Modocs, Odawas, Peorias, Miamis, Wyandots, Osages, Kaws, Nez Perces, Pawnees, Poncas, Sacs and Foxes, Kickapoos, Creeks, Potawatomis, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Wichitas, Wacos, Tawakonis, Kichais, Caddos, Delawares, Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches.

The final extirpation of Indian Country was a profoundly important event for Native Americans. Two decades later, the Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs set out to tell the tale. Riggs conceived and wrote his play in Paris—he frequented the café Les Deux Magots, where Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were also scribbling away. But his mind was on his childhood home. The result, Green Grow the Lilacs, offered a wistful celebration of Indian Country on the cusp of change.

Finding workers wasn’t easy. Peruvian guano lords, unable to recruit their compatriots, relied mainly on Chinese laborers, whom they lured onto eastbound ships with false promises or sometimes simply kidnapped—between 1847 and 1874, at least sixty-eight of these ships mutinied.

This was more than an attempt to win freedom for the rioters. It was a challenge to the legality of U.S. empire, and it made its way quickly to the Supreme Court. The court sided with the prosecution, affirming that U.S. law “unequivocally” extended to Navassa. Still, the defense had a point. If this was U.S. territory, where was the government?

The story of the guano islands may seem trivial. After all, how important could a few dozen uninhabited islands be? Yet the guano craze of the nineteenth century left three legacies, all of which would shape the fate of the Greater United States. The first was legal.

The second legacy was strategic.

The third and most immediate legacy was agricultural.

By inventing ammonia synthesis, Fritz Haber became arguably the single most consequential organism on the planet.

There are two ways to respond to rebellion: with reforms or force.

The First Volunteer Cavalry recruited from all over the country, and Roosevelt was proud to draw to his ranks not only Harvard men but Yale and Princeton graduates as well. Yet the Ivy Leaguers made up only a small portion of the regiment.

Roosevelt got shot in the chest at close range and then proceeded to give his intended speech for an hour as the blood ran from his body.

To McKinley, none of the choices was particularly appetizing. Returning the colony to Spain would be “cowardly,” handing it over to anyone else would be “bad business.” He doubted that Filipinos could govern themselves. He thus saw only one option: take the Philippines, “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could for them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”

Columbia, an earlier literary name for the country. Though they