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

by Daniel Immerwahr

When have you ever seen a map of the United States that had Puerto Rico on it? Or American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas, or any of the other smaller islands the United States has annexed over the years?

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. From the day the treaty securing independence from Britain was ratified, right up to the present, it’s been a collection of states and territories.

But the United States’ empire was nonetheless sizable. Measured by population, it was, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the fifth largest in the world.

A class of seventh-grade girls at the Western Michigan College Training School in Kalamazoo

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.

Guano Islands Act in 1856. Under its terms, whenever a U.S. citizen discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island, that island would, “at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.” It was an obscure word, appertaining, as if the law’s writers were mumbling their way through the important bit. But the point was this: those islands would, in some way, belong to the country.

In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.

Fritz Haber

Luckily, not all of them perished. Although Clara’s married name was Haber, she is today known by her maiden name, the name under which she defended her dissertation: Clara Immerwahr. Her cousin Max was my great-grandfather.

“I don’t propose to be swept off my feet by the catastrophe,” wrote McKinley the next day. “The country can afford to withhold its judgment and not strike an avenging blow until the truth is known.” Roosevelt displayed none of McKinley’s caution. “Dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards” was his diagnosis, and the newspapers concurred. “Remember the Maine!” replaced “Remember the Alamo!” as the battle cry of a wounded nation.

Lmao

“God has given us this Pacific empire for civilization,” said Senator Albert Beveridge. “A hundred wildernesses are to be subdued. Unpenetrated regions must be explored. Unviolated valleys must be tilled. Unmastered forests must be felled.”

Misogynistic Undertones here

Soldiers stand over a trench filled with men’s and women’s corpses after the Bud Dajo Massacre, 1906. W.E.B. Du Bois declared this photograph to be “the most illuminating thing I have ever seen” and proposed displaying it in his classroom “to impress upon the students what wars and especially Wars of Conquest really mean.”

The ploy was used repeatedly, in country after country around the Caribbean. 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, Mexico (three times), and Haiti (twice) between 1903 and 1934. The United States helped to put down revolts, replaced governments when necessary, and offered battleships-in-the-harbor “advice” to others. But the only territory it annexed in that period was the U.S. Virgin Islands, peacefully purchased from Denmark

They are even lower than Italians.

Even the donor who’d funded the award hadn’t known of Rhoads’s Puerto Rican legacy. And that’s how you hide an empire.

“War,” the comedian Jon Stewart has observed, is “God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

Manuel Quezon vibrated with anger. “I cannot stand this constant reference to England, to Europe. I am here and my people are here under the heels of a conqueror,” he exclaimed. “How typically American to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room.”

In his soliloquy, Wayne’s character mourns Bataan and the “thirty-six thousand United States soldiers” stranded there, “trapped like rats but dying like men.” Actually, there were easily more than twice that many U.S. soldiers trapped on Bataan. It’s just that the other ones were Filipinos.

He wasn’t the last, though. Every sitting president since has traveled widely. Every one has left the Western Hemisphere. Simply put, World War II made the United States a planetary presence.

Going global: Number of in-office trips taken abroad, by president, from Washington to Obama

“Never before have persons been so interested in the entire world,” gushed Popular Mechanics. Certainly the technicalities of representing a spherical planet on a map’s flat surface had never commanded such fascination. As public consciousness expanded, the details of cartographic projection mattered. The world must be seen anew, the poet Archibald MacLeish wrote, as a “round earth in which all the directions eventually meet.” “If we win this war,” he continued, “the image of the age which now is opening will be this image of a global earth, a completed sphere.”

In 1940 nearly one out of every three individuals on the planet was colonized. By 1965, it was down to one in fifty.

It’s easy to ignore standards. But once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere. You realize how much relies on the silent coordination of extremely complex processes.

Roosevelt gave his horse the dramatic name Rain-in-the-Face; Hoover’s animal companion was a cat, whom he addressed as Mr. Cat.

Foreign prisons, walled compounds, hidden bases, island colonies, GPS antenna stations, pinpoint strikes, networks, planes, and drones—these are the locales and instruments of the ongoing war on terror. This is the shape of power today. This is the world the United States made.

Yet empire is not only a pejorative. It’s also a way of describing a country that, for good or bad, has outposts and colonies. In this sense, empire is not about a country’s character, but its shape. And by this definition, the United States has indisputably been an empire and remains one today.