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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Secure access to raw materials—one of the chief benefits of colonization—no longer mattered that much.

oil is the one raw material that has most reliably tempted politicians back into the old logic of empire.

But Seattle to Florida was a two-month journey, requiring the ship to go down the Pacific coast of South America, around Tierra del Fuego, and back up through the Gulf of Mexico.

It was a known bug: humans didn’t travel well. Take them from one part of the planet to another and their typical response was to get sick and fall down.

Panamanians who had lived with those mosquitoes their whole lives had acquired immunity to yellow fever and resistance to malaria. Outsiders, however, were fresh bait. Of the first batch of U.S. mainlanders to arrive in the Panama Canal Zone, nearly all were immediately laid low by malaria. Later officials came bringing their caskets with them.

Altogether, opening the canal took ten years and cost nearly a third of a billion dollars—more if you count the cost of the landslides that perpetually closed the canal in its first years. As usual, records kept on the deaths of nonwhites were shoddy, but we think some fifteen thousand workers, mainly West Indian, died from accident or disease while on the job. And all to tame a strip of land ten miles wide and not even fifty miles long.

“Roads, it would seem, are no longer essential to military operations” is how a writer summed up the lesson of the Hump. Certainly Japan’s control of Burma had been inconvenient, but Tunner had proved that it wasn’t fatal. After the Hump, he wrote, he “knew that we could fly anything anywhere anytime.” Anything anywhere anytime—this was a far cry from the world of just half a century earlier, when getting to Cuba from Florida was an ordeal.

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.

College football was a popular sport in the 1920s, yet it 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 wasn’t until 1927 that traffic lights were standardized. Before that, drivers in Manhattan stopped on green, started on yellow, and understood red to mean “caution.” A different system prevailed in Cleveland, a different one in Chicago, a different one in Buffalo, and so on.

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.

As he saw it, 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.

The ability of empires to promulgate standards was a major benefit of colonial conquest. Imperial standardization meant that even in faraway lands, the colonizers’ practices would be adhered to. Empires imprinted colonies with new laws, ideas, languages, sports, military conventions, fashions, weights and measures, rules of etiquette, money, and industrial practices. In fact, that’s what colonial officials spent much of their time doing.

Empires standardized people, too.

But the point here is that the easy flow, which has made the Philippines the United States’ top supplier of foreign nurses since the 1960s, is not the consequence of markets alone. The Philippines has a competitive advantage because of the generations of nurses who learned their craft precisely to U.S. standards.

The U.S. delegates had planned to spring the subject of unification on the British at the last moment, but to their surprise the British brought it up immediately. Abandoning 55-degree screws for 60-degree ones would devastate British manufacturers. But given the exigencies of war, they were willing to try it temporarily.

It was, as they say, an important event in pipe history.

In industry after industry, the world tuned itself to the United States. This happened literally in music, where countries bickered over the pitch of a concert A. The United States had been tuning its instruments to an A of 440 hertz since 1917. But continental Europe was officially tuned to the “French pitch,” a slightly flatter A of 435 hertz, closer to the classical pitches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Austrian delegates pushed for A435 at the United Nations. Yet with U.S. recordings flooding the market and the U.S. government broadcasting a pure A440 tone around the world from powerful radio stations in Maryland and Hawai‘i as a “service” to musicians, the Austrians stood little chance. Today, except for those playing period instruments such as baroque flutes or older church organs, A440 is the law of the land.

This, more than anything, showed the stupefying privilege the United States enjoyed in the realm of standards. It could force other countries to adopt its screw thread angle in the name of international cooperation. But it was never bound by those imperatives itself.

The ongoing U.S. rejection of metric measures leads to frequent annoyance and occasional catastrophe—a Boeing 767 plane carrying dozens that lost power midair because its fuel load had been mistakenly calculated in pounds, a Mars probe that disintegrated because of U.S. software that used pounds rather than kilograms.

Today, China makes more plastic than the United States does. Yet even if it has not won every match, the United States has consistently enjoyed a sizable home-court advantage. It has had the luxury of sticking to its ways while forcing other countries to retool their factories and retune their instruments. The benefits of this are many. Yet one sticks out and is worth special examination. That is the global adoption of a single language: English.

English has spread like an invasive weed, implanting itself in nearly every habitat. It has created a world full of people ready and able to assist English speakers, wherever they may roam. A world almost designed for the convenience of the United States. A world of Squantos.

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.

The norm in history has been linguistic difference, not sameness.

Outside of the settler population, though, enforcing English as a national language proved to be a more violent undertaking. Slave owners made a point of separating African slaves who spoke the same language. Those caught speaking their home languages could face serious punishment; there are reports of some having their tongues cut out. The result was total linguistic annihilation. Although traces of African idioms can be found in today’s black speech, not a single African language made it over on the slave ships and survived.

Indigenous languages were sites of conflict, too. Starting in the late nineteenth century, reformers pushed tens of thousands of Native American children into white-run boarding schools. There, cut off from their families and communities, the students studied English. “We shall break up all the Indian there is in them in a very short time,” promised the founder of one such school. Students caught speaking indigenous languages were routinely beaten or had their mouths washed with soap and lye.

On Guam, the naval government prohibited the use of Chamoru on school grounds, in courts, and in governmental offices. Children caught speaking it in schools would be beaten or fined. One naval officer collected all the Chamoru dictionaries he could find and burned them.

Yet the empire was vast, and there simply weren’t enough colonial officials to wash out every offending mouth. So the government relied on other tools. It passed laws in English, demanded that civil servants use English, and, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, made English proficiency a requirement for voting. Most important, colonial authorities turned to education.

Teddy Roosevelt, though obsessed with the “English-speaking peoples,” spoke French and German and could follow along in Italian. Woodrow Wilson, the era’s other scholar-president, read German scholarship and contemplated moving to Europe to better learn the language. Herbert Hoover ranged even further. He had tried to learn Osage as a boy, his first publication was a translation of a sixteenth-century Latin treatise on mining, and he and his wife, Lou, used Mandarin (learned while living in China) when they wished to speak privately. The polyglot presidency was a reaction to a world teeming with languages, a world where English got you only so far.

“The empires of the future are empires of the mind,” Winston Churchill announced in 1943 in a speech at Harvard. The key to that mental colonization, he believed, was linguistic.

Even Albert Einstein had been brought to his knees by what he called English’s “underhanded orthography.”

The challenges English faced went beyond the technical ones. Colonial rule, which had been one of the chief vehicles for spreading English, was visibly breaking down. Decolonization would ultimately release more than six hundred million people from rule by Britain and the United States. Would they stick with English?

Very likely not. Many complained bitterly of the havoc English had wreaked on their countries. Mohandas Gandhi regarded India’s reliance on English as a “sign of slavery.” The Kenyan author James Ngugi judged the “psychological violence of the classroom” to have been just as harmful as the “physical violence of the battlefield.” He recalled his own childhood in a mission school, when students caught speaking their native Gikuyu were beaten, fined, or made to wear signs reading I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. After decolonization, he changed his name to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and gave up writing novels in English.

I. A. Richards watched all this with alarm. Third World nationalism, he warned, could “wreck all hopes for English.”

lol well boo fucking hoo

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.

The next group to go in for English was the scientists. Modern science has always been international, and scientists were accustomed to having to learn one another’s languages to read the latest research.

In Israel, scientists joke that God himself couldn’t get tenure at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem—he only has one publication, and it’s not in English. They’re not wrong. Of the 1,921 research publications listed on the websites of the faculty members at Hebrew University’s Racah Institute of Physics, every one is in English.

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. “The product comes from America so we must either adapt to English or stop using it. That is the right of business. But if you are talking about a technology that is supposed to open the world to hundreds of millions of people you are joking. This just makes the world into new sorts of haves and have nots.”

The “bitter truth,” reported The New York Times recently, is that “English is the de facto national language of India.”

That is the bitter truth of many countries.

For those who speak English as a foreign language, the reasons are clear. English is the language of power. Speaking it means going to better schools, getting better jobs, and moving in more elite circles. A study commissioned by the British Council of five poorer countries (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Rwanda) found that professionals who spoke English earned 20 to 30 percent more than those who didn’

Perhaps the most extraordinary privilege, though, is that people from the United States don’t have to struggle with foreign languages. While everyone else pays the cognitive tax of learning English, English speakers can dispense with language classes entirely. In 2013 the Modern Language Association found that college and university enrollments in foreign languages were half what they had been fifty years earlier. In other words, U.S. students have responded to globalization by learning half as many languages.

“It’s embarrassing,” Obama has admitted. “When Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup

The Second World War locked the trajectory in. That war gave the United States more than two thousand overseas base sites. And it was hard to imagine giving them all back. Right at the war’s end, Harry Truman announced that his country coveted no territory. It was an anodyne statement, nearly identical to those his predecessors had often made. Yet this time it triggered what the State Department called a “storm of comment” from the press, Congress, and military leaders. What about the bases? they asked. Surely Truman wasn’t going to let them go, was he? Truman hastily clarified. The United States would take no colonies, he explained, but it would “maintain the military bases necessary for the complete protection of our interests and of world peace.”

This was the new way. As the United States loosened its grip on large colonies, it grabbed bases and small islands more tightly. In the Philippines, it refused to leave entirely after independence.

Nevertheless, the Marshallese were ushered off the atoll, and the military detonated two atomic bombs there on July 1, 1946, each more powerful than those dropped on Japan. The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb. Réard unveiled the bikini on July 5, 1946. The day before, the Fourth of July, was another historic day: the independence of the Philippines. The high commissioner, in his speech, couldn’t resist spelling out the connection between decolonization and the atomic tests of a few days before. The Philippines was finally independent, he proudly announced. Nevertheless, he reminded, “all nations have yielded some of their independence, of their absolute independence, to the airplane, the radio, and the atom bomb.”

The Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson proposed halting open-air bomb testing for fear of the cancer risks (a later study by the National Cancer Institute confirmed that nearby Marshall Islanders had endured cancer-causing levels of radiation exposure). Richard Nixon dismissed this as “catastrophic nonsense.” Cornelius Rhoads, who by then had moved on from experimenting on Puerto Ricans to become the most prominent cancer researcher in the country, agreed with Nixon.

The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.

Not only did the contracts provide profits, they offered Japanese firms a chance to master U.S. standards—i.e., the standards that were rapidly spreading out all over the world. 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.

Deming’s beatification spoke to the centrality of the U.S. military in Japan’s economic growth. The more that military fought, the more Japanese firms profited. The Korean War had been a godsend. The Vietnam War helped, too. The men who fought it drank Kirin beer, carried Nikon cameras, rode Honda motorbikes, and dropped bombs with Sony parts. The polyethylene body bags they came home in? Made in Japan.

But as prescient as Washington’s planners were about the political blowback from bases, they thought little about the economic consequences. They propped up Japan’s economy, including allowing it to discriminate against U.S. imports, on the assumption that it would be a regional powerhouse but never a rival to the United States. As John Foster Dulles, who presided over the treaty ending the occupation, put it, Japanese products had “little future” in the United States. They were just “cheap imitations of our own goods.” Dulles was, to put it gently, wrong about that. What he didn’t foresee—what no one foresaw—was that in using Japan to launch its military campaigns in Asia, the United States was sowing the seeds of its own deindustrialization.