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

by Daniel Immerwahr

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.

Instead, Roosevelt’s government encouraged Panamanian nationalists to secede from Colombia, and then he negotiated for a small zone in which to build the canal. The U.S. lease was perpetual, and within the zone, the treaty gave the United States “all the rights, power, and authority” it would possess “if it were the sovereign of the territory.” But, as in Guantánamo Bay, the United States wasn’t the sovereign—technically.

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” was the more accurate euphemism. To ensure political and financial “stability,” U.S. troops entered Cuba (four times), Nicaragua (three times), Honduras (seven times), the Dominican Republic (four times), Guatemala, Panama (six times), Costa Rica,

In 1917, under the pressures of incipient war, Wilson backed another important bill, this one concerning Puerto Rico. It made Puerto Ricans citizens and allowed them to elect legislators (though the Washington-appointed governor could still veto all legislation).

The Birth of a Nation became the country’s most popular film. The Klan, which by 1915 had become defunct, was relaunched. Its recruiters used the film to draw in millions of members.

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.

“Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”).

The colonies had their uses: as naval bases and zones of experimentation for men such as Daniel Burnham and Cornelius Rhoads. But colonial products weren’t integral to the U.S. economy.

The 1930s are known as a decade of protectionism, when the United States put up hefty tariffs to barricade itself against the world.

Nervous about a Japanese invasion and eager to put its massive Pacific territory to use, the Roosevelt administration set out to build a road. This would not only connect Alaska to the mainland, it would help the government ferry supplies to the allied Soviet Union.

Martial law in Hawai‘i lasted nearly three years, which was two and a half years longer than Japan posed any plausible threat to the islands.

The Japanese occupied the islands for more than a year and transported Attu’s tiny population (42) to Japan as prisoners of war. Half of them died there.

Conquering part of Alaska was a significant achievement, and propagandists brought relics from the Aleutians to the Japanese home islands for proud display. U.S mainlanders were far less aware of the event, and that is because of official censorship.

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.

Japanese internment during World War II is one of the most regretted episodes in U.S. history. In May 1942 some 112,000 residents of western states, some Japanese nationals and some U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry, were forcibly removed from their homes and held in camps for years.

Roosevelt signed the infamous Executive Order 9906, calling for the internment of Japanese in the U.S. West, in February 1942, after much deliberation.

Whereas West Coast internment, Hawaiian martial law, and Aleut internment lasted years, the Philippine internment was ended in weeks by the Japanese invasion in late 1941.

Alaska Natives endured a harsh Jim Crow system: separate seating in theaters, segregated schools, and NO NATIVES ALLOWED signs on hotels and restaurants. Gruening confessed that he “did not know what resentment might lurk behind their smiling faces.” Nor did the mainland soldiers, who worried that Alaska Natives, if armed, might turn their guns against the army.

“If Jap comes here and lands his boat, will you shoot him quick?”

When the Japanese floated flaming balloons across the Pacific in a futile attempt to firebomb North America, the Territorial Guard located and retrieved them.

On that day, the Japanese launched a near-simultaneous strike on the Allies’ colonies throughout the Pacific. Because surprise bombings work best at the break of day, the idea was to attack the major targets—Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam, and Hong Kong—shortly after dawn.

MacArthur’s planes were not in the air, and they were certainly not on their way to Taiwan. They were on the ground, lined up in rows. The astonished Japanese pilots dropped their bombs.

Repeated warnings from Washington went unacknowledged; direct orders were ignored.

The Japanese struck sometime after noon, nine hours after MacArthur’s phone had rung. “We could see our beautiful silver Flying Fortresses burning and exploding right before our eyes as we stood powerless to do anything about it,” one B-17 navigator wrote.

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.

The Roosevelt administration had already agreed with Britain on a “Germany first” strategy for the war, which meant prioritizing Europe.

Yet in mainlanders’ eyes, the whites who had faced Japan were heroes, MacArthur most of all. While the generals in charge of Hawai‘i on December 7 were relieved of their commands and subjected to repeated investigations, MacArthur got a Medal of Honor for his “gallantry and intrepidity.” Congress declared June 13, 1942, to be Douglas MacArthur Day, and button makers sold MACARTHUR FOR PRESIDENT pins.

Yet white powers would never allow Asian independence, the Japanese insisted. It had to be seized. Emperor Hirohito claimed that the war’s origins lay “in the past, in the peace treaty after World War I,” when Woodrow Wilson had blocked Japan’s attempt to introduce racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. With the most idealistic of the Allies unwilling to concede even the principle that all races deserved the same consideration, what were the chances that Asians would ever be accepted as equals?

“It was as if the Philippines had become one vast military prison,” one writer remembered. A diarist described Manila in the second month of Japanese rule: “Every day on my way to the office, I run across dozens of Filipinos who have been tied to posts as punishment for some trivial offense which they have committed. Usually the victims are black and blue or bleeding from the terrific lashings they have received.” Public beheadings, carried out on the spot and without a trial, were not uncommon.

Just as Germany was caged in by neighboring countries, Japan was hemmed in by empires: the British Empire (Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong), the Dutch Empire (the Dutch East Indies, now known as Indonesia), the U.S. Empire (the Philippines, Alaska, Hawai‘i, Guam), and China, in which every imperialist had a hand. The Japanese called this “ABCD encirclement” (American-British-Chinese-Dutch), and it meant that Japan’s access to oil, rubber, tin, and even food depended on foreign markets. The turbulent 1930s, which had shut down international trade, illustrated the danger in this. If Japan wanted its industrial economy to keep growing, it would need to take those colonies itself.

The reason was partly priority—the Roosevelt administration held fast to its “Germany first” strategy. But it was also geography. The distance from San Francisco to MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia was more than twice as far as from New York to England. And, whereas the Atlantic supply lines connected large, long-established ports such as New York and Liverpool, the Pacific lines had to rely on hastily developed ports, some built from scratch, including on far-flung Pacific locales such as Guadalcanal, Tutuila, Kwajalein, and Manus.

MacArthur could bypass Japanese strongholds, snip their supply lines, and leave them “pocketed and cut off from outside aid.” He called it his “hit ’em where they ain’t—let ’em die on the vine” philosophy.

On Attu they did. When Allied forces moved to reclaim the island in 1943, the ensuing battle killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers and wiped out nearly the whole Attu garrison of more than two thousand Japanese soldiers, who fought to the death. It was a high price to pay, on both sides, for an island whose prewar population had been less than fifty.

In October 1944 more than two hundred thousand of MacArthur’s troops began their assault on the Philippines, shutting down sea-lanes and storming the beaches. MacArthur himself waded ashore on the island of Leyte, south of Luzon, on October 20, 1944. “I have returned,” he announced to the Filipino people by radio. “Rally to me.”

“We slammed the back door shut before we began to fight” is how the official history of MacArthur’s leading division put it. A group of military historians judged this enclosure of the city to be “the strategic blunder of the Philippine campaign.” Having cut off Iwabuchi’s escape route, MacArthur practically guaranteed that the admiral would make his final stand in a densely populated city.

The “better to lose a building than an American life” logic succeeded in protecting mainland soldiers. In the month of fighting, 1,010 of them died. Compare that with the 16,665 Japanese troops who perished. And compare that with the 100,000 Manilans killed. For every “American life” lost, 100 Manilans died.

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.

“It marked in fact the turning of the ‘Hinge of Fate,’” Churchill wrote. “It may almost be said, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.’”

in 1940, when the Roosevelt administration traded fifty destroyers to Britain for base sites in British territories in the Western Hemisphere—including in Newfoundland, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Jamaica, and Trinidad. The United States didn’t own these sites outright; it got them on ninety-nine-year leases. But its jurisdictional powers were startling, “probably more far-reaching than any the British Government has ever given anyone over British territory before,” the ambassador to Britain boasted.

Teddy Roosevelt had been the first sitting president to leave the continental United States—a seventeen-day trip to Panama and Puerto Rico.

Japan was not divided into zones run by different authorities. There was a single supreme commander for the Allied Powers, appointed by President Harry Truman. Truman picked Douglas MacArthur.

The occupation radically remade Japan, turning it into “the world’s greatest laboratory for an experiment in the liberation of people from totalitarian military rule,” in MacArthur’s telling. The emperor was demoted from an infallible deity to an affable public figure who attended baseball games. A massive land reform campaign dispossessed many absentee landlords. Hundreds of millions of new textbooks were printed to train Japanese students in democratic ways. Public health authorities vaccinated the whole Japanese population—all eighty million—twice for smallpox (the largest vaccination campaign in history to that point) and dusted some fifty million with DDT.

As Douglas MacArthur stood on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, where he accepted Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945, he could smell liberation in the air.

The Manila protest set off a string of others. Twenty thousand soldiers protested in Honolulu, three thousand in Korea, five thousand in Calcutta. On Guam, the men burned the secretary of war in effigy, and more than three thousand sailors staged a hunger strike. Protests erupted in China, Burma, Japan, France, Germany, Britain, and Austria, too, with supporting demonstrations in Washington, Chicago, and New York.

Dropping the badly bruised Philippines in exchange for goodwill within the tumultuous decolonizing world wasn’t a hard choice.

Well-known among the civil rights movement’s triumphs are the desegregation of schools won in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the prohibition of racial discrimination at the polls secured by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less touted in the textbooks are the admission of Alaska and Hawai‘i as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states in 1959. But those, too, were serious blows against racism. For the first time, the logic of white supremacy had not dictated which parts of the Greater United States were eligible for statehood.

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.

“One cannot look at the slums of any Puerto Rican town without feeling that there has been grievous neglect and an obligation unfulfilled,”

The PPD would instead champion a middle solution—not independence, not statehood, but something in between. The hope was to gain autonomy for Puerto Rico without losing access to the U.S. market (“the biggest and most prosperous in the world,”

Puerto Rico suffered from many maladies, but, in the near-unanimous view of mainlanders, they all stemmed from a single root. The island’s women, as one official put it, “kept shooting children like cannon balls at the rigid walls of their economy.”