How to Hide an Empire Quotes

“English has spread like an invasive weed, implanting itself in nearly every habitat. It has created a world full of people ready and able to assist English speakers, wherever they may roam. A world almost designed for the convenience of the United States.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“At various times, inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. What they haven't been, by and large, is seen.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“In other words, if you looked up at the end of 1945 and saw a U.S. flag overhead, odds are that you weren’t seeing it because you lived in a state. You were more likely colonized or living in occupied territory.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Where tyranny is law, revolution is order,” Albizu declared.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Together with innovations in chemistry and industrial engineering, the U.S. mastery of logistics would diminish the value of colonies and inaugurate a new pattern of global power, based less on claiming large deaths of land and more on controlling small points. (Page 216)”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“The racism that had pervaded the country since slavery engulfed the territories, too. 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. They, too, had to make their way in a country where some lives mattered and others did not.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“times had changed. The chief impetus for rethinking the value of colonies was the global Depression. It had triggered a desperate scramble among the world’s powers to prop up their flagging economies with protective tariffs. This was an individual solution with excruciating collective consequences. As those trade barriers rose, global trade collapsed, falling by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932. This was exactly the nightmare Alfred Thayer Mahan had predicted back in the 1890s. As international trade doors slammed shut, large economies were forced to subsist largely on their own domestic produce. Domestic, in this context, included colonies, though, since one of empire’s chief benefits was the unrestricted economic access it brought to faraway lands. It mattered to major imperial powers—the Dutch, the French, the British—that they could still get tropical products such as rubber from their colonies in Asia. And it mattered to the industrial countries without large empires—Germany, Italy, Japan—that they couldn’t. The United States was in a peculiar position. It had colonies, but they weren’t its lifeline. Oil, cotton, iron, coal, and many of the important minerals that other industrial economies found hard to secure—the United States had these in abundance on its enormous mainland. Rubber and tin it could still purchase from Malaya via its ally Britain. It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”). Yet the United States didn’t depend on its colonies in the same way that other empires did. It was, an expert in the 1930s declared, “infinitely more self-contained” than its rivals. Most of what the United States got from its colonies was sugar, grown on plantations in Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. Yet even in sugar, the United States wasn’t dependent. Sugarcane grew in the subtropical South, in Louisiana and Florida. It could also be made from beets, and in the interwar years the United States bought more sugar from mainland beet farmers than it did from any of its territories. What the Depression drove home was that, three decades after the war with Spain, the United States still hadn’t done much with its empire. 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. In fact, they were potentially a threat.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who somehow managed to trade up authority over New York’s parks—a position that traditionally entailed little more than serving the needs of the city’s bird-watchers—into a decades-long stranglehold over municipal politics. On the national level, there was J. Edgar Hoover, the spymaster who held presidents under his thumb. And in foreign relations, exercising more effective authority than perhaps anyone else in U.S. history, it was Douglas MacArthur.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan” is how Roosevelt’s speech began. Note that in this formulation Japan is an “empire,” but the United States is not. Note also the emphasis on the date. It was only at Hawai‘i and Midway, of all Japan’s targets, that the vagaries of the international date line put the event on December 7. Everywhere else, it occurred on December 8, the date the Japanese use to refer to the attack.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Hoover’s greatest challenge was one of the least visible: the humble screw thread. Screws, nuts, and bolts are universal fasteners. They function in industrial societies, as one writer put it, like salt and pepper “sprinkled on practically every conceivable kind of apparatus.” Yet every such society encounters, early on, the vexing problem of incompatible screw threads. 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. .... Screw thread incompatibilities grew even more worrisome with the advent of cars and planes—complex vibrating objects whose failure could mean death. The problem had hobbled the armed forces in the First World War, which led Congress to appoint a National Screw Thread Commission. Still, it took years, until 1924, before the first national screw thread standard was finally published. It wasn’t a big-splash innovation like the Model T or the airplane, but that hard-won screw thread standard quietly accelerated the economy nonetheless.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Although the frontier had advanced by fewer than two miles a year in the 150 years following Jamestown’s establishment, in the first half of the nineteenth century it shot west at nearly forty miles a year, stopping only when settlers reached the Pacific Coast.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“In 1845 the United States Magazine and Democratic Review coined an indelible phrase and captured the prevailing mood when it wrote of the nation’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“The political scientist Benedict Anderson called it the “logo map.” Meaning that if the country had a logo”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Marshallese were ushered off the atoll, and the military detonated two atomic bombs there on July 1, 1946, each more powerful than those dropped on Japan. The test made the once-obscure atoll a household name. Four days after it, the French fashion designer Louis Réard debuted a two-piece bathing suit. He dubbed it the “bikini,” on the grounds that the sight of a woman’s mostly unclothed body was as sensational as the bomb.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“was gone,” the narrator concludes. “The world”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“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. In 1988 Congress apologized for the “fundamental injustice” of this and awarded each internee $20,000—a rare instance of the government paying reparations.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Insular Cases split the country into what one justice called “practically two national governments,” one bound by the Bill of Rights, the other not.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“law. The Supreme Court had disagreed. 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.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“government, which had collected the tariffs, sought to defend its actions. It argued that the term the United States was ambiguous. The name could refer to all the area under U.S. jurisdiction, but it could also refer, in a narrower sense, to the union of states. The Constitution’s references to “the United States,” the argument continued, were meant in that narrow sense, to refer to the states alone. Territories thus had no right to constitutional protections, for the simple reason that the Constitution didn’t apply to them. As one justice summarized the logic, the Constitution was “the supreme law of the land,” but the territories were “not part of the ‘land.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“The final extirpation of Indian Country was a profoundly important event for Native Americans. Two decades later, the Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs set out to tell the tale. Riggs conceived and wrote his play in Paris—he frequented the café Les Deux Magots, where Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were also scribbling away. But his mind was on his childhood home. The result, Green Grow the Lilacs, offered a wistful celebration of Indian Country on the cusp of change. It is a gentle, nostalgic play, though with a defiant ending. When, in the last act, a federal marshal appears on the scene, the characters refuse to cooperate with him, explaining that they are “jist plumb full of Indian blood” and that they regard the United States as a “furrin country.” With that uneasy confrontation, the curtain falls. Riggs’s play was well received when it debuted in 1931. Today, however, it is remembered less on its own merits than as the basis for the musical Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. “I kept most of the lines of the original play without making any changes in them, for the simple reason that they could not be improved upon—at least not by me,” Hammerstein told the press.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“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.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“On the centennial of Samuel Morse's 1844 WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT message, which had traveled between Washington and Baltimore, the Signal Corps sent the same message around the world in three and a half minutes. Less than a year later, it sent another message around the globe in nine and a half seconds. It used only five wireless stations, each able to transmit for thousands of miles by reflecting radio waves off the ionosphere. The message? THIS IS WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT. It was signed ARMY COMMUNICATIONS MESSAGE.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“The Philippine schools were essentially satellites of mainland universities. The Philippine Medical School, for instance, copied its curriculum from Johns Hopkins. Promising Filipino nurses were brought to the mainland to study. The result was hospitals staffed not just by trained nurses but by mainland-trained nurses. This allowed freshly arrived mainlanders to fit easily into roles as teachers and supervisors, with little adjustment.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Arthur MacArthur IV,”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“We live in the era of the scientific savage,” he reflected, “where all the wisdom of science,
mathematics and physics are used for the purposes of assassination.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“Where tyranny is law, revolution is order”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

“The Hollywood version contains only two muted references to radiation. And it ends on a much happier note: “The menace was gone,” the narrator concludes. “The world could wake up and live again.” The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.”
― Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States