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

by Daniel Immerwahr

The United States lost more than planes. The attack on Pearl Harbor was just that, an attack. Japan’s bombers struck, retreated, and never returned. Not so in the Philippines. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids, then by invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos—U.S. nationals who saluted the Stars and Stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief—fell under a foreign power. They had a very different war than the inhabitants of Hawai‘i did.

“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.

The political scientist Benedict Anderson called it the “logo map.” Meaning that if the country had a logo, this shape would be it.

Was it important that the United States possessed, to take one example, Howland Island, a bare plot of land in the middle of the Pacific, only slightly larger than Central Park? Yes, it was. Howland wasn’t large or populous, but in the age of aviation, it was useful. At considerable expense, the government hauled construction equipment out to Howland and built an airstrip there—it’s where Amelia Earhart was heading when her plane went down. The Japanese, fearing what the United States might do with such a well-positioned airstrip, bombed Howland the day after they struck Hawai‘i, Guam, Wake, Midway, and the Philippines.

leftist author Howard Zinn,

The United States might not have physically conquered Western Europe after World War II, but that didn’t stop the French from complaining of “coca-colonization.” Critics there felt swamped by U.S. commerce. Today, with the world’s business denominated in dollars and McDonald’s in more than a hundred countries, you can see they might have had a point.

Since 1945, U.S. armed forces have been deployed abroad for conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping if you want, or call it imperialism. But clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.

I’d travel by “jeepney,” a transit system originally based on repurposed U.S. Army jeeps.

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.

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

the United States maintains roughly eight hundred overseas military bases around the world.

These tiny specks—Howland Island and the like—are the foundations of U.S. world power. They serve as staging grounds, launchpads, storage sites, beacons, and laboratories. They make up what I call (building on a concept from the historian and cartographer Bill Rankin) a “pointillist empire.” Today, that empire extends all over the planet.

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.

The reason isn’t hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire.

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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’s appointed governor to Louisiana Territory, like Arthur St. Clair, griped about the “mental darkness” of Louisiana’s inhabitants. Allowing them to vote, he believed, “would be a dangerous experiment.” Louisianians protested their disenfranchisement. “Do political axioms on the Atlantic become problems when transferred to the shores of the Mississippi?” they asked on a trip to the capital. Jefferson shrugged his shoulders and did nothing.

Disease took so many lives in Britain’s first permanent North American settlement at Jamestown, established in 1607, that it wasn’t until the 1690s that births outpaced deaths there.

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.

scofflaws,

The government sent seven thousand militiamen and volunteers to round them up at bayonet point and imprison them. The incarcerated Cherokees were then forcibly relocated to present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokees called this journey Nunna daul Isunyi, the “trail where we cried.” The Trail of Tears, as it is known in English, was a bitter march, undertaken by some on foot. Starvation, cold, and disease killed thousands, including Ross’s wife.

In the venerable U.S. tradition of naming places for the people who have been driven from them, the newly opened territory was called Oklahoma, a Choctaw word meaning “red people.”

extirpation

Arable land contains nutrients, without which plants will not grow. The most important by far is nitrogen, one of the four building blocks of life (CHON: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen).

Worse, by delivering the produce of the countryside to distant cities, the new agriculture broke the age-old cycle that had restored waste—human and animal—to the land, returning nitrates to the soil. Nineteenth-century agronomists cringed at the thought of large cities flushing into rivers and oceans the nitrogenous wastes that could have fertilized the fields.

Gadsden Purchase,

Guano entrepreneurs hastily formed the American Guano Company, with a capitalization of $10 million (a number that grows more impressive once you realize that all federal expenditures in 1850 totaled less than $45 million). They begged President Franklin Pierce to send the navy to Howland and Jarvis to protect their diggings from foreign interlopers.

Those who made trouble were “triced”: tied up for hours in the hot sun with their arms in the air and their feet barely touching the ground.

Harrison’s sympathies tipped toward the rioters. He commuted the death sentences of the leaders and raised the issue in his annual message. “It is inexcusable that American laborers should be left within our own jurisdiction without access to any Government officer or tribunal for their protection,” he said. It was a thundering presidential endorsement of a principle that had until then remained nebulous. No matter how remote those shit-spattered rocks and islands were, they were, in the end, part of the United States.

pointillist

Haber–Bosch process,

In a single stroke, Haber had opened the floodgates for the virtually unlimited growth of human life.

In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.

lariats,

It was, in Roosevelt’s eyes, more than a naval classic. It was a playbook for a dynamic country that had just encountered the limits to its growth. The United States must seize an empire. And if it had to carve it out of existing empires, so be it. “I should welcome almost any war,” Roosevelt declared in 1897, “for I think this country needs one.”

Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and this is what you got: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that fed on land but avoided incorporating people. Uninhabited guano islands—those were fine. But all of Mexico or Nicaragua? No.

This was the flip side to the careful annexations, another way to control who was part of the country and who wasn’t. From the start, the census had declined to count most indigenous people. Thus, for more than a century, a government that had reliable decennial tallies of its toymakers and chimney sweeps, of its cows and its horses, could not say how many Indians lived within its borders.

The Insular Cases are far less well-known. Until very recently, it was not unusual for constitutional scholars to have never heard of them. But they are nevertheless still on the books, and they are still cited as good law. The court has repeatedly upheld the principle that the Constitution applies to some parts of the country but not others. That’s why a citizen on the mainland has a constitutional right to trial by jury, but when that citizen travels to Puerto Rico, the right vanishes.

That “indefinite period” continues to this day. All the territories that the court deemed “incorporated” have become states. All the territories that it ruled “unincorporated” remain territories. Today, around four million people live in those unincorporated territories—people who have no representation in Congress, who cannot vote for president, and whose rights and citizenship remain a gift from Washington. They could seek statehood, as indeed a large number in Puerto Rico would like to do. But statehood is, like so many other things, at the sole discretion of Congress—a legislative body in which neither Puerto Ricans nor other colonial subjects have a vote.

Twain was not just an anti-imperialist, he was the most famous anti-imperialist in the country. He became the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York and chronicled the expanding war with withering sarcasm. “There must be two Americas,” he mused. “One that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.” For that second America, Twain proposed adding a few words to the Declaration of Independence: “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed white men.” He suggested a modified flag: red, black, and blue, with the stars replaced by a skull and crossbones.

The fantasy of conquest is always the same: defeat the leader and the country is yours. The United States had learned the folly of this when it won the Philippines from Spain, only to find itself fighting the Philippine Army. It was about to learn the lesson again.

“They have sown the wind,” one captain said. “They shall reap the whirlwind.”

The friendly overtures worked: Pershing was elected a datu—the only datu within U.S. officialdom—and became honorary father to the wife of the sultan of Bayan.

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.

Misfits in WASP-y Cambridge, such men were nevertheless the hyper-elite of their home countries. When Albizu was elected as one of the club’s two vice presidents in 1914, the other vice president was T. V. Soong, later reputed to be the world’s richest man. One of Soong’s sisters was about to marry Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Chinese revolution. Another would marry Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Republic of China (first on the mainland, then Taiwan) from 1928 to 1975.

Re: Harvard's Cosmopolitan club

Cuba also agreed, as part of the price of getting Wood to leave, to lease a forty-five-square-mile port to the United States for military use. Guantánamo Bay, as the leased land was called, would technically remain Cuban territory, but the United States would have “complete jurisdiction and control” over it.

The Japanese delegation asked to at least insert language about racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. This proposal had a majority of votes behind it—the French delegation deemed the cause “indisputable.” But Wilson blocked it, refusing to let even the principle of racial equality stand.

Such animosity meant little to U.S. leaders at the time—they didn’t have much business in places like Egypt and Korea. But later it would come to mean a great deal. The Chinese protester complaining of “robbers” in Paris—that was a young Mao Zedong. Nguyen the Patriot also gained renown, although by another name: Ho Chi Minh. That Egyptian boy reciting poems and making speeches was Sayyid Qutb, a leading Islamist thinker who would become the key inspiration for Osama bin Laden. And Albizu? Pedro Albizu Campos would become the most dangerous domestic anti-imperialist the United States would ever face.

Yet what struck observers, repeatedly, was how much poverty remained amid the plenty.

Just like today

It was a lesson Burnham learned to take seriously. At roughly the same time as he was drawing up his plans for Manila, he started on another large urban plan, for Chicago. Chicago and Manila—they were his most ambitious projects. Today they’re the two cities that most clearly bear his mark.