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October 17 - October 25, 2023
“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.
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.
Puerto Rico became a “commonwealth,” which ostensibly replaced a coercive relationship with a consenting one.
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.
One of the truly distinctive features of the United States’ empire is how persistently ignored it has been.
Large-scale fecal repatriation
In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.
to hold even a point in the face of hostile onslaught, you had to hold the territory around it. Hence the tendency of bases to bloom into full-fledged colonies.
The newspapers played it up, portraying Cuba as a damsel in distress, her dusky virtue besmirched by the rapacious Catholics of Spain.
But an aura of “Wait, that really happened?” engulfed much of Theodore Roosevelt’s life.
The war may have begun as an empire-wide revolt by Spain’s colonial subjects, but it ended as the “Spanish-American War.”
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.
And so, over the protests of Native Hawaiians, more than thirty-eight thousand of whom had signed anti-annexation petitions, the United States seized the islands.
Weighty legal questions often turn around trivial disputes.
But whereas the Navassa case had affirmed the government’s power to apply federal laws in its territories, the new rulings denied territorial inhabitants the right to federal protections.
The court has repeatedly upheld the principle that the Constitution applies to some parts of the country but not others.
The International Dog-Shoe-Face Incident
The United States seized the levers of finance and trade but left sovereignty formally intact. “Dollar diplomacy” was the polite name for this, though “gunboat diplomacy”
They functioned as laboratories, spaces for bold experimentation where ideas could be tried with practically no resistance, oversight, or consequences.
Still, once in a while, someone slipped into the role of sahib and played it to pith-hatted perfection.
architecture of power,
“Where tyranny is law, revolution is order,”
During the war, the military tested its gases and gear on more than sixty thousand of its own men.
They transferred Silliman University to the hills and ran it as a “jungle university” (after the war, Philippine universities accepted transfer credits from Jungle University).
He stopped playing Risk and started playing Go,
The twin Pacific campaigns were long and brutal, and it’s telling that many veterans of the war who went on to political greatness earned their spurs in them.
Four other airmen shot down later in the same area were captured and became the unfortunate victims in the highest-profile documented instance of Japanese wartime cannibalism.
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.
U.S. mastery of logistics would diminish the value of colonies and inaugurate a new pattern of global power, based less on claiming large swaths of land and more on controlling small points.
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.”
vexillologists
Asian Spring.
Whereas most states had laws outlawing contraception as well as aggressive “bluenose brigades” to enforce them, Puerto Rico had legal birth control and an obliging government. And, of course, Puerto Ricans had a history of serving as subjects for experimental medical research,
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.
In 1965 a governmental survey found that more than a third of Puerto Rican mothers between the ages of twenty and forty-nine had been sterilized, at the median age of twenty-six. Of the mothers born in the latter part of the 1920s, nearly half had been sterilized.
In 1947 Muñoz Marín’s party created a migration bureau, a rare case of a state agency dedicated to getting people to leave an area. The government distributed millions of pamphlets to help people adjust to life on the mainland. Muñoz Marín’s colleagues set up a three-month training program for women seeking to enter mainland domestic service. They practiced talking in English, washing dishes, polishing silver, answering the phone, and doing laundry.
loophole in the tax code exempted corporations from federal taxes if they were based primarily in the territories.
Journalists who had had conspicuously little to say about the anticolonial uprising of 1950 were only too happy to sound off about Puerto Rican gangs, dope fiends, and switchblade artists. The inflammatory reportage quickly made its way into the culture at large.
In so doing, they also helped to create the world we know today, where powerful countries project their influence through globalization rather than colonization.
Complex industrial societies depended on goods that they couldn’t mine or grow at home. But it wasn’t just that they needed those goods, they needed secure access to them, the kind that couldn’t be denied even if war broke
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 synthetic revolution that began in the 1940s had rewritten the rules of geopolitics.
that oil is the one raw material that has most reliably tempted politicians back into the old logic of empire.
What those waterlogged troops discovered that afternoon was an age-old truth, one that had governed history up to that point: moving things is hard.
Planes not only added speed, they changed the laws of geopolitics.
them. The ability of empires to promulgate standards was a major benefit of colonial conquest.
Politically, Australia remained British. But materially, it looked a lot like a U.S. colony.
It was, as they say, an important event in pipe history.
Washington flooded the world with its arms and equipment. In accepting them, foreign militaries had to adopt U.S. standards as well.
