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

by Daniel Immerwahr

The Japanese military, for its part, fell back on a painfully familiar set of repressive techniques. It blocked movement in and out of towns. It tortured suspects, using among its techniques the infamous “water cure.” And it established reconcentration zones. Yet there was one trick Japan tried that the United States hadn’t. It decided to grant the Philippines independence. Not to promise independence—the United States had done that, eventually—but to actually grant it. On October 14, 1943, that’s what Japan did.

A new president was sworn in: Jose Laurel, a Yale-educated justice of the Philippine Supreme Court. His father had died in a U.S. reconcentration camp. Laurel received a twenty-one-gun salute.

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 37th Infantry Division, in particular, believed in the “use of heavy firepower to the maximum,” as its commander, General Robert S. Beightler, put it. The 37th was known as the most wasteful division in the theater for its use of artillery ammunition. “This reputation has certainly never bothered us,” Beightler explained, “for we only point to the fact that we fought for more than two years and lost fewer men than other divisions with comparable fighting.”

Rather than engage Iwabuchi’s men in direct combat, it would simply destroy any buildings in which they might be hiding. “Putting it crudely, we really went to town,” Beightler reported. “To me, the loss of a single American life to save a building was unthinkable.”

In Beightler’s mind, he was facing a trade-off—and not a particularly difficult one—between lives and architecture. But, as he well knew, those buildings were inhabited. Some by enemy soldiers, of course, but many by civilians. Those civilians were “Americans,” too, even if no one treated them that way.

Demonic, maybe, but not indiscriminate. The “better to lose a building than an American life” logic succeeded in protecting mainland soldiers. In the month of fighting, 1,010 of them died. Compare that with the 16,665 Japanese troops who perished. And compare that with the 100,000 Manilans killed. For every “American life” lost, 100 Manilans died.

Senator Millard Tydings surveyed the colony after the war. He estimated that 10 to 15 percent of its buildings had been destroyed, and another 10 percent damaged. After the war, Filipinos submitted claims to the government on behalf of 1,111,938 war deaths. Add Japanese (518,000) and mainlander fatalities (the army counted slightly more than 10,000) and the total climbs to more than 1.6 million. 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 ...

The novelist Neal Stephenson got it right when he described the U.S. military in World War II as “first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.”

Simply put, World War II made the United States a planetary presence. State Department officials furiously churned out wartime memos establishing U.S. policy—often for the first time—regarding every nation, colony, region, and sub-duchy on the map.

There was a single supreme commander for the Allied Powers, appointed by President Harry Truman. Truman picked Douglas MacArthur. Finally, MacArthur had a task that matched his sense of self. Simultaneously, he led the Japanese occupation, the U.S. military’s Far East Command, and the U.S. Army in the Far East. Later, while still holding all those positions, he would also take command of the United Nations forces in the Korean War. Though officially he answered to Washington and to the Allies’ Far Eastern Commission, in actuality MacArthur had, as he put it, “absolute control over almost 80-million people.” The U.S. ambassador to Japan gasped. “Never before in the history of the United States had such enormous and absolute power been placed in the hands of a single individual.”

Somehow, in the anything-goes atmosphere of the 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.

But what is less often appreciated is how much territory the United States had won, too. In 1940 its colonized population had made up about 13 percent of the Greater United States. Now, adding it all up—the colonies and occupations—yielded a much larger total. The overseas area under U.S. jurisdiction contained some 135 million people. That was, remarkably, more than the 132 million who inhabited the mainland. In other words, if you looked up at the end of 1945 and saw a U.S. flag overhead, odds are that you weren’t seeing it because you lived in a state. You were more likely colonized or living in occupied territory. Probably somewhere in the Pacific.

Today, the idea that the United States might have annexed France or claimed Europe’s Asian colonies in 1945 seems like an absurd counterfactual. But it wasn’t unthinkable. That was, in fact, precisely what Germany and Japan had just done. And it wasn’t too different from what the United States had itself done, repeatedly, to formerly Spanish lands throughout the preceding century.

At the war’s end, the United States possessed the world’s fourth-largest empire, accounted for more than half the world’s manufacturing production, and had atom bombs.

In late 1945, counting the occupations, 51 percent of the population of the Greater United States lived outside the states. But by 1960, after Hawai‘i and Alaska entered the union, that number had fallen to around 2 percent, which is roughly where it has been ever since. Today, all U.S. overseas territory, including base sites, comprises an area smaller than Connecticut. How did this happen?

There are two answers to that question, both having to do with how empire changed as a result of the Second World War. First, that war fueled a global anti-imperial resistance movement that put up major impediments to colonial empire. Second, it introduced other ways of projecting power across the planet, ways that didn’t depend on large colonies.

In 1940 nearly one out of every three individuals on the planet was colonized. By 1965, it was down to one in fifty.

This was what the Second World War had done. Colonized peoples had seen their white overlords defeated by an Asian power—it was the sort of sight that was hard to unsee.

“What kind of government is this?” asked one of the soldiers. “What are we that scream piously, ‘the world must be free,’ then keep it to ourselves?”

In 1934, Congress, eager to relieve itself of the economic and military burdens of empire, had provisionally slated the colony for independence. But independence was firmly predicated on the commonwealth government protecting life and property and assuming the bonded debt held by the colonial government. If it did those things, it would gain its liberty on the Fourth of July, 1946.

“We are a troubled people,” Roxas admitted in his speech on July 4, 1946. With the cities in ruins and violence brewing in the countryside, that was impossible to deny. But there was joy, too. A specially sewn U.S. flag, with one star stitched in each of the Philippines’ forty-eight provinces, was ceremoniously lowered. Up the same cord rose the Philippine flag, to deafening applause. MacArthur turned to Carlos Romulo. “Carlos,” he said, “America has buried imperialism here today.”

It was a moment worth marking. When Filipinos had declared independence in 1898, the United States had fought a bitter, fourteen-year war against them. Generations of politicians had insisted, with some wavering during the Wilson years, that Filipinos were unfit for self-governance. Yet now, with no law or army forcing it to do so, the United States was letting its largest colony go. And it was doing this, remarkably, so as not to look bad in the eyes of Asians. What is more, it didn’t stop. The U.S. Virgin Islands received its first black governor in 1946 and its first native governor in 1950. Guamanians won citizenship and a civil government in 1950, after decades of advocacy. American Samoans remained “nationals” rather than citizens, but they, too, saw naval rule replaced with government by civilians, in 1951.

Countenancing Philippine independence had required U.S. leaders to let go of the racist fear that Filipinos couldn’t govern themselves.

Hawai‘i, well-known for its mixing of Native, Asian, and European strains, seemed particularly threatening. “We do not want those people to help govern the country,” a Massachusetts newspaper put it baldly. “When future issues arise in the United States Senate, we do not want a situation where vital decisions may depend upon two half-breed senators.”

“How can we fervently plead for self-determination etc. for Indonesia and every other G-string people when we deny the most elementary expression of self government to our own?”

The problem was that statehood, unlike other concessions to decolonization, required Congress’s assent. And here Truman came up against a hard fact. In party politics, the two territories were balanced, it being widely assumed that Hawai‘i would be a Republican state and Alaska a Democratic one (exactly wrong, it turned out). But their admission would quite obviously unbalance national politics on another axis. Whatever the party allegiances of these new states, their racial composition would put them firmly in the civil rights camp. Southern Democrats in the Senate, nervous about what these states would do to Jim Crow, threatened to filibuster. Thus opened a front in the war for civil rights that rarely gets mentioned.

Well-known among the civil rights movement’s triumphs are the desegregation of schools won in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the prohibition of racial discrimination at the polls secured by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less touted in the textbooks are the admission of Alaska and Hawai‘i as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states in 1959. But those, too, were serious blows against racism. For the first time, the logic of white supremacy had not dictated which parts of the Greater United States were eligible for statehood.

Fong and Inouye proved to be, just as white supremacists feared, champions of civil rights. And had the segregationists gazed farther into the future, they would have been still more troubled by something else taking place in Hawai‘i at the time. 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.

Birth control also stoked the ire of the nationalists, who had learned from the Rhoads affair to view doctors and diagnoses of “overpopulation” with deep suspicion. Albizu regarded Puerto Rico as underpopulated and saw birth control as an insidious attempt to “invade the very insides of nationality,” to carry the war against Puerto Rican freedom to the womb.

Their poverty and marginal position in U.S. society made them all-too-convenient fodder. It is perhaps not a surprise, then, that Puerto Rico became the proving ground for one of the twentieth century’s most transformative inventions: the birth control pill.

McCormick was impatient for large-scale field trials. “How can we get a ‘cage’ of ovulating women to experiment with?” she asked Sanger. The team considered tests in Jamaica, Japan, India, Mexico, and Hawai‘i. In 1954 Pincus visited Puerto Rico and was suitably impressed. Here was a place where they could undertake, as Pincus expressed it to McCormick, “certain experiments which would be very difficult in this country.”

The next year, a team of researchers allied with Pincus began another large-scale trial of the pill in Puerto Rico. Yet again, the side effects were hard to ignore. One researcher noted that the women appeared to be suffering from cervical erosion (“whatever you call it, the cervix looks ‘angry’”), but the tests continued. Stopping them would mean delaying approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which the researchers were eager to get. They got it. In 1960, basing its decision largely on the Puerto Rican trials, the FDA approved the birth control pill for commercial sale.

Nor was it just the pill. With a supportive government and a network of clinics, Puerto Rico became a laboratory for all sorts of experimental contraceptives: diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, spirals, loops, intrauterine devices, hormone shots, and an “aerosol vaginal foam” known as “Emko” distributed to tens of thousands of women. Searle, Youngs Rubber, Johnson & Johnson, Hoffman-La Roche, Eaton Labs, Lanteen Medical Laboratories, and Durex all sponsored research there in the forties and fifties.

“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.”

Despite his extraordinary career, Pedro Albizu Campos is hard to find in surveys of U.S. history. He’s not in comprehensive scholarly series such as the Oxford History of the United States or The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, and I haven’t found a single textbook used in mainland schools that mentions him. Even books designed to uncover suppressed histories, such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, ignore Albizu. The most important academic venue in U.S. history, The Journal of American History, has never discussed him.

Sondheim cut those verses but left in a portrait of island life, offered in the song “America,” that managed to capture nearly every stereotype about Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was, in the song, an “ugly island” of “tropic diseases,” with “hurricanes blowing” and its “population growing.” Before West Side Story premiered, the editors of La Prensa, a Puerto Rican paper in New York, called the show’s producers to object to the portrayal of Puerto Rico as disease-ridden. They threatened to picket if the song wasn’t altered. Sondheim conceded, later, that their complaint was justified. But he changed nothing.

Lunar colonization was a distant dream in Rhodes’s day and even seems far-fetched now, but at the time, it appeared graspable. One has to keep in mind the wrenching technological innovations that the leaders of the United States had already witnessed in their lifetime. Dwight Eisenhower was born into a world containing only a countable handful of cars, a world where lightbulbs were still a novelty. Yet he lived to see computers, nuclear bombs, supersonic jets, and manned spacecraft. Who was to say that the science-fiction tales of settling distant planets were fantasies?

Whereas colonizers in the nineteenth century had annexed territory with pride, by the 1960s they understood that forthright imperialism risked infuriating the increasingly powerful Third World. By then, even taking the uninhabited moon seemed as if it might kick up trouble.

It may help to look at the decline of colonialism from a different angle, focusing not just on supply but on demand as well. The worldwide anti-imperialist revolt drove the cost of colonies up. Yet at the same time, new technologies gave powerful countries ways to enjoy the benefits of empire without claiming populated territories. In doing so, they drove the demand for colonies down.

the world we know today, where powerful countries project their influence through globalization rather than colonization.

A national speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour was imposed to reduce the wear on the mainland’s tires. In June 1942 Roosevelt warned that confiscating civilian tires was a real possibility, perhaps an inevitability. A high-ranking official confided to a journalist that soon there might not be enough rubber for baby bottles. Another proposed reducing the length of condoms by half. It took his colleagues a moment to realize he was joking.

But Hitler had not solved the rubber problem. When the war started, Germany’s production and stockpiles sufficed for only two months of fighting. Throughout the war, the Wehrmacht was perpetually short of fuel and rubber. Hitler relied on risky blitzkrieg tactics—sudden all-or-nothing attacks—in part because he simply couldn’t confront his enemies in sustained combat. His troops moved largely using horses.

The replacement of colonial rubber with synthetic rubber was a sort of magic. Yet it wasn’t the only rabbit that chemists yanked from their hats. What’s extraordinary is how many raw materials the United States weaned itself off during the war. Silk, hemp, jute, camphor, cotton, wool, pyrethrum, gutta-percha, tin, copper, tung oil—for one after another, the United States found synthetic substitutes. Throughout its economy, it replaced colonies with chemistry.

Synthesizing anything—that was a lot to ask for. But it wasn’t absurd. Two years before Feynman’s prediction, in 1957, the chemical company Monsanto had installed the “House of the Future,” made entirely from synthetics, at Tomorrowland in Disneyland. By that year, in the United States, synthetic rubber outsold natural rubber, plastic had displaced leather, and margarine was more common than butter. And Gregory Pincus had just begun his birth control experiments with synthetic hormones in Puerto Rico.

Synthetics visibly remade everyday life. They also, less visibly, remade geopolitics.

The most popular plan within the State Department in the early years of the war was to place the world’s colonies under international management. This was a touch more enlightened than old-school conquest, but the end-state was much the same. Powerful countries would, through some international body, ensure their access to the tropics. It was colonization by committee.

U Thant, the Burmese politician who served as secretary-general of the United Nations in the 1960s, was stunned. “The truth, the central stupendous truth, about developed economies is that they can have—in anything but the shortest run—the kind and scale of resources they decide to have,” he marveled. “It is no longer resources that limit decisions. It is the decisions that make the resources. This is the fundamental, revolutionary change—perhaps the most revolutionary mankind has ever known.”