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January 23 - September 17, 2020
In the Philippines, the attackers laid waste to the largest concentration of U.S. warplanes outside North America—the foundation of the Allies’ Pacific air defense.
On a single day, the Japanese attacked the U.S. territories of Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island, and Wake Island.
They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.
“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.
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.
A People’s History of the United States,
In W.E.B. Du Bois’s eyes, black people in the United States looked more like colonized subjects than like citizens. Many other black thinkers, including Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers, have agreed.
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.
seeing a familiar history differently.
Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.
Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a handful of minor outlying islands,
the United States maintains roughly eight hundred overseas military bases around the world.
The reason isn’t hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire. It was born in an anti-imperialist revolt and has fought empires ever since, from Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich and the Japanese Empire to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. It even fights empires in its dreams. Star Wars, a saga that started with a rebellion against the Galactic Empire, is one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.
George Washington warned, after the revolution, of the “settling, or rather overspreading the Western Country … by a parcel of banditti, who will bid defiance to all authority.” To prevent this, he proposed drawing a settlement boundary, just as the British had, and prosecuting as a felon any citizen who crossed it.
Washington thus insisted that settlement proceed in a “compact” manner, under elite control.
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.
The territories merely had to cross a series of population thresholds: five thousand free men, and they could have a legislature; sixty thousand free inhabitants (or sooner, if Congress allowed), and they could be states.
Initially, territories were to be ruled by an appointed governor and three judges.
Despite his seeming satisfaction with the country’s original dimensions, Jefferson came to be known as an expansionist for his acquisition of Louisiana, which extended the country far west of the Mississippi. Yet that was more of an impulse buy than a considered purchase. In sending negotiators to Paris to bargain with Napoleon, he wasn’t even trying to get vast tracts of western land. Rather, he wanted valuable ports on the Gulf of Mexico. The initial response of Jefferson’s emissary to Napoleon’s offer of all of French North America is telling: “I told him no, that our wishes extended only
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But by the mid-eighteenth century, something was changing. Ben Franklin was the first to notice it. In 1749 he organized a census of Philadelphia and began to collect population numbers on Boston, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. What he saw was startling. Not only was the colonial population growing, it was doubling once every twenty-five years. If that continued, Franklin predicted (with more than a little giddiness), in a century colonial North America would contain more Englishmen than Britain itself.
And in 1855, exactly a hundred years after Franklin published his prediction that North American colonists would outnumber Britons in a century, the U.S. population surpassed that of Britain for the first time.
With arable land stretching to the horizon, settlers spread like bacteria.
In 1845 the United States Magazine and Democratic Review coined an indelible phrase and captured the prevailing mood when it wrote of the nation’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”
In 1828 the state of Georgia declared the Cherokee constitution invalid and demanded the Cherokees’ land. President Andrew Jackson approved.
Indian Country was, from the perspective of Washington, less a colony than a holding pen.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which created those territories, is best known for inciting the Civil War, as the struggle over whether the territories would allow slavery led to bloody conflicts in Kansas.
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.”
By the time the last claim was filed, in 1902, the United States’ oceanic empire encompassed ninety-four guano islands.
manufacturing fertilizer from the unreactive N2 in the atmosphere.
The breakthrough came in 1909, when Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish chemist, developed a technique for synthesizing ammonia, a nitrogen compound.
In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.
Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the Naval War College. Mahan’s lengthy 1890 treatise, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, was hardly a page-turner, but it contained a powerful suggestion. If, according to Turner, the land was closed, Mahan noted that the seas were open.
“I should welcome almost any war,” Roosevelt declared in 1897, “for I think this country needs one.”
On February 15, 1898, the Maine mysteriously exploded, killing 262 men. It was, depending on the explanation, possibly an act of war.
“Remember the Maine!”
Whatever the cause, McKinley was loath to ramp up the conflict with Spain. “I have been through one war,” he said, thinking of his service in the Civil War. “I have seen the dead piled up. I do not want to see another.” Roosevelt rolled his eyes. “McKinley is bent on peace, I fear.”
Later in life, as he was about to speak at a campaign event, Roosevelt got shot in the chest at close range and then proceeded to give his intended speech for an hour as the blood ran from his body.
To McKinley, none of the choices was particularly appetizing. Returning the colony to Spain would be “cowardly,” handing it over to anyone else would be “bad business.” He doubted that Filipinos could govern themselves. He thus saw only one option: take the Philippines, “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could for them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”
annus mirabilis,
Theodore Roosevelt, spoke of America in his first annual message and never looked back. In one two-week period, Roosevelt used the name more than all his predecessors combined had.
Looking back on the years before 1898, one sees a pattern. Though the United States had rapidly annexed new territory, it had rarely incorporated large nonwhite populations. Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, Texas, and the Mexican cessions—these added a lot of area to the country but only relatively small “foreign” populations (Native Americans mainly, but also Mexicans, Spaniards, French, and, in the case of Louisiana, free blacks).
The United States annexed the thinly populated northern part of Mexico (including present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) but let the populous southern part go.
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.
Alaska, which Andrew Johnson’s administration sought to purchase from Russia in 1867, encountered the same resistance. “We do not want … Exquimaux fellow citizens,” griped The Nation. The deal went through only because, in the end, there weren’t that many “Exquimaux,” and there was quite a lot of Alaska.
In the past, republicanism and white supremacy had been jointly maintained by carefully shaping the country’s borders. But absorbing populous nonwhite colonies would wreck all that.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the notorious case that upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” Jim Crow institutions.
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.
“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.
“Of course, we do want military glory,” wrote Twain, noting the death toll, “but this is getting it by avalanche.”
