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

by Daniel Immerwahr

Territorial policy was set, instead, by a series of laws, most famously the Jefferson-inspired Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which covered a large part of the present-day Midwest (similar laws covered other regions). The Northwest Ordinance has become part of the national mythology, celebrated in textbooks for its remarkable offer of statehood on “an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever.”

If the “best speakers and writers” could be stretched to include presidents, that was true. Though McKinley, like most of his predecessors, declined to use America in his public addresses, the reluctance ended there. His successor, 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. Every president since has used America freely and frequently. The anthems changed, too: no longer “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” but “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America.”

linguistic shift from "United States" to "America" to imply a greater expanse

A few wished to go farther. Some proslavery advocates, worried that the booming white settler population might crowd out slavery, sought room for their way of life farther south. They staged a series of “filibusters,” private invasions of Latin American republics that, they hoped, would lead to annexations. The most dramatic was William Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua in 1855, which improbably propelled Walker briefly to the Nicaraguan presidency.

Tension between the white settler population boom, between not enough white settlers for induction into union and too many white settlers for slavery to be profitable

Republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion—the country could have at most two.

The best they could hope for was to win some measure of respect by showing themselves worthy in their colonizers’ eyes. In the realm of architecture, that looked like Juan Arellano carrying out Burnham’s plans with even greater devotion than William Parsons had.

Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, Ashford, Gutiérrez, and their colleagues treated hundreds of thousands and headed off the direst cases, of which there were many. Hookworm treatment, plus parallel campaigns that the military ran against yellow fever and smallpox, brought the Puerto Rican death rate down dramatically. Yet Ashford and Gutiérrez watched in frustration as their patients succumbed to reinfection again and again. Treatment could forestall death, but all the worm pills in all the dispensaries couldn’t change the larger facts: most Puerto Ricans were poor, they worked outdoors without shoes or privies, and their government lacked the resources, and possibly the will, to do much about that. Medicine reduced hookworm disease’s morbidity in Puerto Rico, but not its spread. In 1930 it stood pretty close to where it had been when Ashford first arrived more than thirty years earlier. It was now chronic rather than acute, but it still afflicted eight or nine in ten rural Puerto Ricans.

Wow. Difference in funding in autonomy on mainland vs colonial treatment of hookworms

sugar tariffs and the lax enforcement of landholding laws.

wonder if there's explication by the author on this

The court, to its great credit, disagreed. Martial law in Hawai‘i was illegal, it concluded, and civilians there deserved the same protections as mainland civilians. “Racism has no place whatever in our civilization,” one justice scolded. That ruling came, however, only in 1946—by which time not only martial law but the war itself had ended.

I wonder whether jurisprudence actualy preceded the material circumstances?

Japan had something different to offer: “Asia for the Asiatics.” That slogan may sound banal today, but for a region long colonized, it was a powerful, revolutionary idea. Even Romulo conceded that it was “morally unassailable.” 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?

racial dynamics that led to Japanese pretext for WW2?

Whether because doctors pushed or women pulled, female sterilization in Puerto Rico grew to staggering proportions. 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.

The most popular plan within the State Department in the early years of the war was to place the world’s colonies under international management. This was a touch more enlightened than old-school conquest, but the end-state was much the same. Powerful countries would, through some international body, ensure their access to the tropics. It was colonization by committee.