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

by Daniel Immerwahr

“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.

Again taking 1940 as our year, slightly more than one in eight (12.6 percent) of the people in the United States lived outside of the states.

Like African Americans, colonial subjects were denied the vote, deprived of the rights of full citizens, called “nigger,” subjected to dangerous medical experiments, and used as sacrificial pawns in war.

And so, as with the logo map, the country was left with a strategically cropped family photo. Readers of the 1940 census were told that the United States’ largest minority was African American, that its largest cities were nearly all in the East, and that its center of population was Sullivan County, Indiana. Had overseas territories been factored in, as western territories had previously been, census readers would have seen a different picture. They would have seen a country whose largest minority was Asian, whose principal cities included Manila (about the size of Washington, D.C., or San Francisco), and whose center of population was in New Mexico.

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.

Besides 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.

It is only the United States that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders.

Once again, Washington rode west across the mountains, this time to quash a rebellion. In the end, the uprising dispersed before Washington’s forces arrived. But the episode remains, as the historian Joseph Ellis has observed, the “first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field.”

In the 1990s an editor at The Washington Post, the Osage journalist Dennis McAuliffe Jr., researched his family history and discovered that it wasn’t the whites who had been pushed off the land, but the Osages. Pa’s neighbors, and perhaps Pa himself, had driven them out by stealing their food, killing their livestock, burning their houses, robbing their graves, and murdering them outright. “The question will suggest itself,” wrote an aghast federal agent who witnessed it all: “Which of these people are the savages?”

Indian Country was successively whittled down until it had been reduced to its southern tip, present-day Oklahoma. The territory’s population, drawn from all over the map, spoke to the wrenching dislocations of the nineteenth century. By 1879, it contained Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Quapaws, Seminoles, Senecas, Shawnees, Modocs, Odawas, Peorias, Miamis, Wyandots, Osages, Kaws, Nez Perces, Pawnees, Poncas, Sacs and Foxes, Kickapoos, Creeks, Potawatomis, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Wichitas, Wacos, Tawakonis, Kichais, Caddos, Delawares, Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches.

It was as if someone had depopulated most of Europe and shunted remnants from each country to an allotment in Romania.

U.S. guano island claims, 1857–1902

That’s a LOT of bird 💩!

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

Having seized Spain’s empire, what should the United States do with it? Explain your answer with reference to economics, geostrategy, and the prevailing racial ideologies of the late nineteenth century.

The Greater United States: Maps like this, taken from the inside cover of a 1900 history textbook, appeared frequently starting in 1899, often as the principal maps of the United States. Shown, along with the states, are a much-diminished Indian Country, as well as Hawai‘i, Guam, Wake, American Samoa, the Philippines, Alaska, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.

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.

Spot on.

From the start, the census had declined to count most indigenous people. Thus, for more than a century, a government that had reliable decennial tallies of its toymakers and chimney sweeps, of its cows and its horses, could not say how many Indians lived within its borders.

When the census did begin to count Alaska Natives, in 1880, and mainland Indians, in 1890, it separated them from the rest of the population lest they contaminate statistics about “the United States.”

Excluding Natives from the census was symbolically significant, sustaining the fantasy that settlers were taming an uninhabited wilderness.

“It is one thing to admit scattered communities of white, or nearly white, men into the rights of citizenship,” one writer put it, “but quite a different matter to act in the same way with a closely packed and numerous brown people.” Or as the skeptical Speaker of the House put it, less politely, “I s’posed we had niggers enough in this country without buyin’ any more of ’em.”

“We ought to take Hawaii, in the interests of the White race,” Roosevelt pressed. And so, over the protests of Native Hawaiians, more than thirty-eight thousand of whom had signed anti-annexation petitions, the United States seized the islands.

By the time the shooting stopped and the treaties were ratified, the United States had gained more than seven thousand islands holding 8.5 million people. Counting Alaska, the overseas empire encompassed an area nearly as large as the entire United States had been in 1784 and held a population of more than twice the size.

As they saw it, overseas colonization was the next phase of Manifest Destiny, the next outlet for the Daniel Boones of the country. “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.”

This is simply nauseating stuff.

The Greater America Exposition, Omaha, 1899

“The White Man’s Burden” — 🤮

Invoking the notion that there were different “senses” of “the United States,” a concurring justice articulated the reasoning in a notoriously convoluted phrase. Puerto Rico was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” he explained, “because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”

Another case where the SCOTUS used contorted, “pretzel-logic” to reach clearly unconstitutional conclusions.

But whereas the Navassa case had affirmed the government’s power to apply federal laws in its territories, the new rulings denied territorial inhabitants the right to federal protections.

And, like Plessy, the Insular Cases were about race. The main majority decision contained warnings about including “savages” and “alien races” within the constitutional fold. Doing so, one of the justices concurred, would “wreck our institutions,” perhaps leading the “whole structure of the government” to be “overthrown.”

But they are nevertheless still on the books, and they are still cited as good law. 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.

Unlike Plessy, these rulings are still on the books!

That “indefinite period” continues to this day. All the territories that the court deemed “incorporated” have become states. All the territories that it ruled “unincorporated” remain territories.

Today, around four million people live in those unincorporated territories—people who have no representation in Congress, who cannot vote for president, and whose rights and citizenship remain a gift from Washington. They could seek statehood, as indeed a large number in Puerto Rico would like to do. But statehood is, like so many other things, at the sole discretion of Congress—a legislative body in which neither Puerto Ricans nor other colonial subjects have a vote.

24,000,000 people who deal with taxation and allegiance to a government with NO REPRESENTATION.

When the portly William Howard Taft made the trek, he reported proudly to Washington, “Stood trip well. Rode horseback twenty-five miles to five-thousand-foot altitude. Hope amoebic dysentery cured. Great province this.” “How is the horse?” was the secretary of war’s cruel reply.

😂 😂 😂

The land wasn’t empty, as much of it lay in the hands of Igorots, Philippine uplanders. But the mainlander-dominated Philippine Supreme Court held that Igorots, being savages, could not own land.

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.”

Word! Such a brilliant encapsulation of the USA's blindness to it's own acts as colonizers.

But Quezon didn’t believe that, and as he stewed, he came to appreciate the logic of Aguinaldo’s position. “This war is not of our making,” he pointed out in a cable to Washington. What right did the United States have to drag the Philippines into a war and then abandon it? Why was Washington defending an imperialist power, Britain, while letting its own people perish? “While enjoying security itself,” Quezon told Roosevelt, “the United States has in effect condemned the sixteen millions of Filipinos to practical destruction.”

“To the death” was not just stirring rhetoric; it was the likely outcome. The Roosevelt administration had already agreed with Britain on a “Germany first” strategy for the war, which meant prioritizing Europe. The acknowledged price of that strategy was letting Japan take the Philippines. Was the United States truly willing to see that happen? Churchill asked. The secretary of war, a former governor-general of the Philippines, reassured him: “There are times when men have to die.”

After the war, Filipinos submitted claims to the government on behalf of 1,111,938 war deaths. Add Japanese (518,000) and mainlander fatalities (the army counted slightly more than 10,000) and the total climbs to more than 1.6 million.

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.

This is absolutely remarkable and incredibly saddening to me.

This was a soldier who had taken a long journey across the Pacific. He’d been briefed on his mission, shown maps, told where to go and whom to shoot. Yet at no point had it dawned on him that he was preparing to save a U.S. colony and that the people he would encounter there were, just like him, U.S. nationals. He thought he was invading a foreign country.

😡 😡 😡

But what is less often appreciated is how much territory the United States had won, too. In 1940 its colonized population had made up about 13 percent of the Greater United States. Now, adding it all up—the colonies and occupations—yielded a much larger total. The overseas area under U.S. jurisdiction contained some 135 million people. That was, remarkably, more than the 132 million who inhabited the mainland.

Despite his extraordinary career, Pedro Albizu Campos is hard to find in surveys of U.S. history.

Even books designed to uncover suppressed histories, such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, ignore Albizu. The most important academic venue in U.S. history, The Journal of American History, has never discussed him.

If mainlanders think about Puerto Rican history in that period at all, the image that comes to their mind is an entirely different one: juvenile delinquency.

Young Puerto Ricans didn’t actually commit many crimes in the postwar period. The evidence suggests that they misbehaved less than other New Yorkers. But as Puerto Ricans poured in from the island, the tabloid press trumpeted sensational tales of their malfeasance. Journalists who had had conspicuously little to say about the anticolonial uprising of 1950 were only too happy to sound off about Puerto Rican gangs, dope fiends, and switchblade artists. The inflammatory reportage quickly made its way into the culture at large. Wenzell Brown, who by the 1950s had become a major pulp fiction writer, introduced his readers to the Puerto Rican underworld with such lurid novels as Monkey on My Back, The Big Rumble, and Run, Chico, Run. Puerto Rican teens featured in the films The Young Savages and Blackboard Jungle. The mute youth accused of murder in 12 Angry Men appeared Puerto Rican. And of course, a Puerto Rican gang—the Sharks—was at the center of one of the most successful musicals ever staged: West Side Story.

Sondheim cut those verses but left in a portrait of island life, offered in the song “America,” that managed to capture nearly every stereotype about Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was, in the song, an “ugly island” of “tropic diseases,” with “hurricanes blowing” and its “population growing.”

Oddly, this wasn’t the only time Stephen Sondheim would dodge Puerto Rican politics. His 1990 musical, Assassins, told the story of nine assassins or would-be assassins of U.S. presidents, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. But it didn’t include Oscar Collazo or Griselio Torresola. Because their motives were political, Sondheim explained, they were “less complex psychologically” than the other assassins. And so Sondheim ended up writing one Broadway musical about New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties and another about presidential assassins—without ever mentioning the New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties who tried to assassinate the president. Still, he got one thing right. As Sondheim put it, indelibly, in West Side Story: “Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America.”

And it meant paying those costs while a competitor—the one whose standard was adopted—got to race ahead unimpeded. With stakes that high, it was easy for firms to get locked into standards battles, leaving hapless firefighters cursing their incompatible hoses.

Just as in my famous battle for Bell Labs’ for the Bidirectional <optical> Line Switched Ring standard, versus Fujitsu’s proposed standard for same!

Hoover insisted that the process be voluntary, as he doubted that imposed standards would gain adherents. But the mere act of the government calling an all-industry convention was often enough to secure agreement.

Actually, a genius idea by Hoover.

Different screws have different measurements, including the thread angles. If those don’t line up between the males and the females, you are, so to speak, screwed.

🔩😎

POWER IS SOVEREIGNTY, MISTER BOND

This whole chapter is magnificent, IMO. If I had set about to “highlight” passages that I found entertaining or enlightening, I might well have covered nearly the whole thing!

In 1935 the State Department announced that it was annexing Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands in the central Pacific. Two days later, it hastily rescinded the announcement. The United States didn’t need to annex those islands, officials clarified with embarrassment. A consultation of the records had revealed that it already owned them.

🤣🤣🤣 How typically American of them.