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March 22 - April 3, 2023
The idea of a summer capital was not new. European colonizers had built a series of hill stations, most famously Shimla in India, where Rudyard Kipling summered and from which the British ruled during the hot months. U.S. officials, fearing the effect of the Philippine climate on their constitutions, sought a hill station of their own. They chose Baguio, 150 miles north of Manila and five thousand feet above sea level. In 1903 the government declared Baguio the summer capital of the Philippines, and in 1904 Forbes charged Burnham with planning the still-unbuilt town.
uplanders.
The restoration of Manila as the all-seasons capital marked a turning point in colonial politics. It corresponded with Woodrow Wilson’s election and his policy of handing over local power to Filipinos. In 1914 more than one in four governmental positions were held by mainlanders. By 1921, it was fewer than one in twenty.
m
The result? Hookworm disease in the South was reduced substantially, with enduring economic effects, mainly due to children staying in school longer. So encouraging were the results that the Rockefeller Foundation took on a more ambitious project: combating hookworm throughout the tropics—history’s first global health campaign.
Health only seems to be worth it when there are economic benefits to be reaped
Albizu’s birthplace, once known for being “delirious” with enthusiasm for the United States, was now etched in memory as the site of the Ponce Massacre. To this day, it remains the bloodiest shooting by police in U.S. history.
Today, Cornelius Rhoads lives in Puerto Rican memory as a villain. On the mainland, however, he’s been remembered differently: as a pioneer of chemotherapy.
Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by the anthropologist Margaret Mead,
The indifference toward the colonies in the culture was met with an equal indifference in the government. Whereas Britain governed its possessions from large, prominent, and imposing edifices, the United States had no colonial building in its capital. Nor did it have a school to train colonial officials. Its territories were ruled by a haphazard and improvised set of bureaucratic arrangements under the army, navy, and Department of the Interior.
Mainland inattentiveness had always been a strain on the territories, but by the 1930s it became an outright danger. That was a decade of economic desperation and military peril, when “Fortress America” built protective barriers against a hostile world. Yet the colonies received little protection. Instead, they watched from the outside as the walls around the mainland grew tall.
Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who somehow managed to trade up authority over New York’s parks—a position that traditionally entailed little more than serving the needs of the city’s bird-watchers—into a decades-long stranglehold over municipal politics. On the national level, there was J.
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“Sakdal rebellion
“War,” the comedian Jon Stewart has observed, is “God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”
The military also insisted on extraordinary precautions against the people of Hawai‘i themselves. Hawai‘i was “enemy country,” as the secretary of the navy saw it, with a suspect population, more than one-third of which was of Japanese ancestry. Thus were the territory’s residents registered, fingerprinted, and vaccinated—the first mass fingerprinting and the largest compulsory vaccination campaign the United States had ever undertaken.
Alaska was thus the “quietest war theater,” or the “hidden front,” as journalists called it. Today it is the forgotten war. Many people are surprised to learn that the Japanese even came near Alaska. They are also surprised to learn of the Aleut internment.
With the best hope for an Allied defense of the Pacific knocked out in one quick blow, the Japanese made brisk work of the rest. Guam fell on December 10, Thailand on the twenty-first, Wake Island on the twenty-third, and Hong Kong on Christmas Day. New Year’s Day saw Manila succumb. Then came the other great colonial capitals of Asia: Singapore on February 15 (the “worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history,” Winston Churchill moaned), Batavia on March 5, and Rangoon on the eighth. In three breathtaking months Japan had brought the Dutch, British, and U.S. empires in the
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“There are no atheists in fox holes” is a familiar wartime proverb, conveying the desperation of frontline combat. It was coined, as it turns out, on Bataan.
Manuel Quezon vibrated with anger. “I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe. I am here and my people are here under the heels of a conqueror,” he exclaimed. “How typically American to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room.”
Japan latched on to the bitterness of the colonized. Japanese propagandists reminded Filipinos of the United States’ long history of empire, starting with the dispossession of North American Indians and moving through the Mexican War, the annexation of Spain’s colonies, and the Philippine War, right up to the scorched-earth policy adopted in the face of the Japanese invasion.
The pretense that all victims of the Japanese were guerrillas was easily dispensed with, as when troops rounded up hundreds of young women for sexual predation. Large hotels, including MacArthur’s Manila Hotel, became the site of organized mass rapes. Diaries kept during the Battle of Manila are replete with other stomach-churning atrocities: pregnant women disemboweled, babies bayoneted, whole families slaughtered. Prepared to die, Iwabuchi’s men felt few moral restraints.
abattoir.
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.
exigency.
During the war, the United States possessed an astonishing thirty thousand installations on two thousand overseas base sites. The men marked their presence with a ubiquitous graffiti tag: a cartoon face peering over a wall, accompanied by the words KILROY WAS HERE. Kilroy, in fact, was everywhere.
irredentism.”
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.
The United States is the only country whose flag, by law, must change when the shape of the country does.
But of course, that’s not what happened. Not even close. Instead, the United States and its allies did something highly unusual: they won a war and gave up territory. The United States led the charge, setting free its largest colony (the Philippines), folding up its occupations, nudging its European counterparts to abandon their empires, and demobilizing its army.
“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?”
Countenancing Philippine independence had required U.S. leaders to let go of the racist fear that Filipinos couldn’t govern themselves. Ending the colonial status of Hawai‘i and Alaska required overcoming racism of a different sort. To accept Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood, mainland politicians would have to reconcile themselves to the prospect of states not firmly under white control.
Ernest Gruening, who had made a decades-long career of opposing racism and imperialism. In 1964 Gruening achieved national fame as one of only two congressmen—out of 506 voting—to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to the direct U.S. entry into the Vietnam War.
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.
demimonde
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.
When economic forces carry sojourners from a poorer area to a richer one, the fortune seekers are usually men. But the Puerto Rican Great Migration was strikingly female—in the half decade after World War II it was 59 percent so. That was partly because foreign women had a harder time crossing U.S. borders, which left an opening for Puerto Rican women, often in domestic service. But it also owed to the encouragement of the island government, which was eager to see the departure of women of childbearing age. Many did leave. In 1950 about one in seven Puerto Ricans lived not on the island, but
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portcullis
On July 25, 1952—the anniversary of the U.S. invasion in 1898—Luis Muñoz Marín was sworn in as the first governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. He raised the Puerto Rican flag slowly up the pole until it reached the height of the Stars and Stripes.
And so Sondheim ended up writing one Broadway musical about New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties and another about presidential assassins—without ever mentioning the New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties who tried to assassinate the president. Still, he got one thing right. As Sondheim put it, indelibly, in West Side Story: “Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America.”
gutta-percha,
Between 1930 and 1950, the volume of plastics produced annually in the world grew fortyfold. By 2000, it had grown to nearly three thousand times its 1930 size.
Thant was exactly right. The synthetic revolution that began in the 1940s had rewritten the rules of geopolitics. Secure access to raw materials—one of the chief benefits of colonization—no longer mattered that much.
morass
For every soldier overseas, the United States would ship sixty-seven pounds of matériel abroad per day. And unlike in the First World War, where the United States shipped to fourteen ports in one theater, now it serviced more than a hundred ports in eleven theaters.
The Second World War, it was clear from the start, would be different. When Hitler invaded Poland, his Luftwaffe had four thousand aircraft—a formidable threat that nearly broke Britain’s defenses. The United States, in response, began to build its own air fleet, putting its full industrial muscle behind the effort. At peak, U.S. plants churned out more than one plane every four minutes—a Luftwaffe every eleven days.
“Fireball Express.”
“aluminum trail,” the hundreds of crashed planes that marked the route to China.
By the end of 1943, planes were touching down in Kunming once every eleven minutes. In a twenty-four-hour period in 1945, Tunner landed one every minute and twelve seconds.
The “Zimmermann Telegram,” as it is now known, was crucial in drawing the United States into the war.
Aviation, knocked-down shipping, wireless communication, cryptography, chloroquine, DDT, and world-proofing. These were disparate technologies, but what united them was their effect on movement. They allowed the United States to move easily through foreign lands it didn’t control, substituting technology for territory.
It was a lesson Moscow would be taught repeatedly. Starting in the late forties, the United States started beaming radio broadcasts into the USSR and its satellites—the communications equivalent of the Berlin Airlift. A few high-powered broadcasting stations in Western Europe were all it took to shred the informational sovereignty of the Eastern Bloc. The Voice of America and two CIA-backed operations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation (later renamed Radio Liberty), egged on dissenters, incited uprisings, and aired governmental secrets.
