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January 23 - September 17, 2020
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.
Puerto Rico became the proving ground for one of the twentieth century’s most transformative inventions: the birth control pill.
And so, just as African Americans made their way in the mid-twentieth century out of the impoverished rural South toward Northern cities—the “Great Migration”—Puerto Ricans made a similar trip. Most landed in New York City. The difference was that Puerto Ricans had a government prodding them along.
Violent protection of the family loomed particularly large in Albizu’s thinking after his return. He saw contraceptives as an insidious imperial plot (“The United States tells us that we shouldn’t have been born”). Sterilization, in his view, was an assault on Puerto Rican women. “The surgeon who sterilizes our women should have his scalpel thrust into his throat,” he advised.
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.
“I would annex the planets if I could,” the British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes once mused. “I often think of that.”
And yet the United States didn’t annex the moon. It didn’t even try. Instead, it went to extraordinary lengths to assure the world that the Apollo program was not about expansion or empire. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, agreeing that no nation could claim sovereignty in space.
the world we know today, where powerful countries project their influence through globalization rather than colonization.
But by the mid-twentieth century, talk of uplifting savages or carrying Christ to heathen lands had subsided, and starker motives shone through more clearly. Colonies were useful for their produce, and they were useful strategically.
Germany found itself in the extremely uncomfortable position of fighting a two-front war without access to either Peru’s guano or Chile’s sodium nitrates. It was only Fritz Haber’s timely invention of ammonia synthesis that kept Germany fighting for four years.
Jeeps rode on synthetic rubber tires. Tanks rolled on synthetic rubber treads, and they rolled much farther than German panzers, whose inferior treads grew brittle and cracked in the cold. (“The Germans apparently had not controlled the distribution of styrene,” one U.S. chemist clucked.) By the war’s end, nearly nine in ten pounds of U.S. rubber were factory-made, mostly from oil. This was, wrote an awed observer, “one of the most remarkable industrial achievements of all time.”
What’s extraordinary is how many raw materials the United States weaned itself off during the war. Silk, hemp, jute, camphor, cotton, wool, pyrethrum, gutta-percha, tin, copper, tung oil—for one after another, the United States found synthetic substitutes. Throughout its economy, it replaced colonies with chemistry.
The first plastic, celluloid, was devised to replace ivory in billiard balls and then made its way into other household goods: combs, knife handles, dentures, and so on.
This was the legacy of the Second World War. Take the world’s most advanced economy, cut it off from most tropical trade, and send it into overdrive—it was the perfect recipe for a synthetic revolution.
The replacements came regularly and rapidly. A writer in 1943 giddily described “a regiment of new man-made materials” that was “turning old industries topsy-turvy.” The antimalarial drug quinine could be replaced by a synthetic called chloroquine, the opium-derived painkiller morphine by one called methadone. Camphor, a key ingredient in medicines, photographic film, and explosives, came only from Japanese-controlled Taiwan. That is, it did until chemists figured out how to synthesize it from turpentine at one-eighth the cost. When the rubber shortage prevented making liquid incendiaries from
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The United States neither claimed new colonies nor organized the joint colonization of the tropics. Instead, synthetics dulled its hunger pangs.
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. One could procure the necessary goods through trade, and if, as in the thirties and forties, the markets closed down, well, that wasn’t the end of the world. It was just time to fire up the synthetic rubber plants.
synthetic diamond bort on the diamond mines of the Congo, Brazil, and South Africa.
bauxite, uranium, and cobalt (essential now to smartphone batteries).
It is fitting, then, that oil is the one raw material that has most reliably tempted politicians back into the old logic of empire.
The moon suits that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin wore had twenty-one layers, and twenty either contained or were made entirely of materials manufactured by DuPont.
Finally, concluding that bargaining with Colombia’s leaders was liking trying to “nail currant jelly to a wall,” Roosevelt threw his support behind rebels, who declared Panama’s independence from Colombia. The newly established republic then leased to the United States a ten-mile-wide strip of land slicing through the middle of the country: the Panama Canal Zone.
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.
Japan was guarding China’s front and back doors, preventing the Allies from aiding it by land or sea. Yet this timeworn strategy didn’t account for aviation. The doors were locked, yes, but the Allies could still come in through the roof.
The biggest planes in operation in World War I had been the German Riesenflugzeug (“giant aircraft”), most notably the Siemens-Schuckert planes, the largest of which could hold two and a half tons—the Germans had built six during the war. But by the end of the Second World War, the United States had produced nearly four thousand B-29 Superfortresses, each of which could carry twenty tons.
south from Miami, flying a route called the “Fireball Express.” They landed on the eastern edge of Puerto Rico, which, along with the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, had been turned into a giant military base. Then south to more bases on the eastern lobe of Brazil, from which they sped east toward Africa.
Aviation allowed this. It also allowed the Allies to do something extraordinary: defeat Japan without setting foot on its main islands. Instead, using bases at Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima, they laid waste to nearly seventy Japanese cities by air.
In 1917 the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a proposal to Mexico promising to help Mexico “reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona” in exchange for an alliance. But the British intercepted the message and shared it with Washington. The “Zimmermann Telegram,” as it is now known, was crucial in drawing the United States into the war.
Truman, Stalin, and Clement Attlee meeting at Potsdam
World War I had killed about eight million in the various belligerents’ militaries. But that was nothing compared with the pandemic of Spanish flu that the war unleashed, which killed somewhere between fifty million and one hundred million.
Whole Pacific islands were blanketed by DDT in advance of landings, destroying the main vectors of disease before the first men hit the beaches.
The First World War drove this point home. The United States sent its troops to Europe. They found, on arriving, that Europeans used different weapons, had a different sizing system for uniforms, and measured distance differently. They also found that there wasn’t much they could do about it. The U.S. Army was fighting an away game, so it made uncomfortable adjustments. It switched over to the metric system for the war’s duration, manufacturing metric provisions, issuing metric maps, and giving its orders in metric units. Fighting in kilometers and kilograms wasn’t easy for men who’d grown up
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Yet deferring to European standards only made sense if Europe was the heart of the Allied war economy, and Europe soon lost its centrality. The fall of France and bombing of Britain took European factories off-line. At the same time, U.S. manufacturing kicked into high gear. By the war’s end, the United States had produced 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, and 41 billion rounds of small ammunition. The war against Hitler may have been a European fight, but it was very much made in the U.S.A.
In the realm of standards, that was an unavoidable truth. Politically, Australia remained British. But materially, it looked a lot like a U.S. colony.
Bowing to inevitability, they voted overwhelmingly to adopt the Anglophone thread angle as the international one (the Soviet Union was the only member to vote no). Countries could still use their national standards, but if they wanted international compatibility, their screw thread angles would need to be 60 degrees.
Worldwide uniformity. Had this been the ambition of a transportation official from, say, Thailand, it would have been laughable. Yet from the United States it was wholly feasible.
The octagonal stop sign came from Michigan, born when a Detroit police sergeant clipped the corners off a square sign to give it a more distinctive shape. But the early signs were yellow, not red. The first national agreement of U.S. state highway professionals rejected the use of red on any sign, since it was hard to see at night. So the U.S. stop sign, adopted as an international standard in 1953, was yellow.
This unique exemption from international standards is not a secret. You see it every day in the realm of weights and measures. While other countries have reconciled themselves to the metric system, designed by the French in the late eighteenth century, the United States has held out. As late as 1971, an extraordinary 56 percent of mainlanders claimed to not even be aware of the metric system.
Still, the United States has refused to relinquish its inches, pounds, and gallons. It stands with Myanmar, Liberia, the Independent State of Samoa, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands as the sole holdouts against the metric system.
the United States has refused to relinquish its inches, pounds, and gallons. It stands with Myanmar, Liberia, the Independent State of Samoa, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands as the sole holdouts against the metric system.
Synthetics diminished the great powers’ need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes. Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication networks without worrying about contiguous territorial access. Innovations in medicine and engineering—such as DDT, antimalarials, plastic-based packaging, and “world-proofed” electronic equipment—further reduced the need for territorial control. They allowed objects and humans to safely travel to hostile terrains, meaning that colonizers didn’t have to soften the ground
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The United States took advantage of its position—as the undisputed economic and political superpower, with its wartime logistical network installed in more than a hundred countries—to push its standards beyond its borders.
That the United States declined to follow victory with annexations—that instead it decolonized—cannot be explained by a sudden onset of altruism. It was due in part to the revolt of colonized peoples worldwide. It was also due to the lessons learned in the war. Fighting and winning that war had taught Washington the art of projecting power without claiming colonies. New technologies helped it achieve, as a writer in the forties
Tisquantum, better known as Squanto. Not only did Squanto speak English, he’d lived in London. Seven years before meeting the Plymouth colonists, he had been kidnapped by an English captain and taken to Europe. He’d sailed across the Atlantic four times—once after being captured, once back and forth on a journey to Newfoundland, and back again with another expedition to his homeland of Patuxet—i.e., southern New England.
The result was total linguistic annihilation. Although traces of African idioms can be found in today’s black speech, not a single African language made it over on the slave ships and survived.
It passed laws in English, demanded that civil servants use English, and, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, made English proficiency a requirement for voting.
After Congress rejected Sequoyah and admitted the larger (and whiter) state of Oklahoma instead,
Mohandas Gandhi regarded India’s reliance on English as a “sign of slavery.”
The result was, after hundreds of years of colonial rule (counting Spain), the Philippines had no indigenous language spoken throughout the archipelago.
The Internet was invented in the United States and has been disproportionately Anglophone ever since.
