How to hide an empire

In 1916, the United Kingdom and the United States both formally commemorated new holidays. The British crown introduced Empire Day; For the Americans, it was Flag Day.

That distinction between the reigning world superpower and its quickly rising successor says a lot. Once, empire was a point of pride, a signal of strength and responsibility, but as the United States established itself as the global leader, that changed. In 1940, 1 in 3 people in the world lived in a self-described empire. By 1965, that total was 1 in 50, and falling. Though the United States hasn’t used the term, a growing body of research argues historians should.

That’s from “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States,” a 2019 book written by historian Daniel Immerwahr. It is a kind of global version of the influential “A People’s History of the United States,” Howard Zinn’s classic from 1980 that was updated in 2003 (the version I read as an undergrad).

Immerwahr argues the American empire looks different, based less on large swaths of land and more on strategic ports. This was made easier still as American science introduced a growing number of synthetic replacements for physical goods, such as synthetic fertilizers and rubber replacements (The United States “replaced colonies with chemistry”). Nonetheless, that American flag waved over a growing number of points in the world — with similar problems that are familiar to any previous empire.

American leaders faced a “trilemma,” as Immerwahr puts it. They’ve had to choose between Republicanism, overseas expansion and white supremacy, but can only achieve two. Rather than drop white supremacy, the United States cut the Republicanism, thereby overseeing the Philippines in the past and currently maintaining Puerto Rico, Guam the US Virgin Islands and other inconsistently administered territories without full nationhood. The book is challenging and worth grappling with, regardless of your own take on it all. I recommend it.

Below my notes for future reference.

My notes:

• Dec 7, 1941: FDR changed his speech to focus on Hawaii, and only nominally mentioned Philippines and other islands, because Pearl Harbor could feel more American, to convey this as an attack on American territory (because of time zones, Pearl Harbor was Dec 7, but it was Dec 8 in the Philippines)
• Political scientist Benedict Anderson calls it “the logo map”
• Teddy Roosevelt would have called them colonies but we shifted to call them overseas territories to avoid an imperialist tone
• Initially Daniel Boone wasn’t celebrated — Franklin called these frontier men “refuse” – because the low class men risked drawing them into war. Some of Boone’s land claims in Kentucky conflicted with Washington’s own
• Territories began in 1784 when Virginia gave federal government land as part of decree that all land west of Mississippi would be territories not states
• Lincoln, West Dakota, Momtezuma are all attempted states that never became
• In 1749 Franklin organized a census to note population was doubling every 25 years —far faster than historically and in Europe. His calculations influenced Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus. The copy of Malthus’s book in Darwin’s library has the Franklin passages underlined
• “As squatters became pioneers, Daniel Boone’s reputation surged” — posthumously made an honorary founding father 
• Chicago: 100 residents in 1830, 1m by 1890
• James Fenimoore Cooper novels were based on Boone.
• Davy Crockett, Wild Bill to John Wayne and Han Solo are all informed by Boone
• Russel Thornton estimates middle ground of 5m Indians in contiguous U.S. before European contact
• Cherokees developed a constitution to operate within the American civilized style and yet Georgia overruled and then ignored a Supreme Court ruling — European named John Ross Cherokee found his home taken by a white man
• From Indian territory and failed western territory congressional seat down to Oklahoma — which is like depopulating all of Europe into an allotment within Romania
• The “Green Grow the Lilacs” play was remade as white into the musical Oklahoma — “the jubilant refrain of the white settler”
• After 1854 Gadsden, in 1857 the Americans started purchasing small carribean islands with no indigenous population because they had bird shit
• Land fertility lagged behind human fertility because at the time of Malthus (1798), we didn’t understand land nutrients (CHON: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen)— indigenous populations had learned to develop nitrogen rich manures, use controlled forest burning and lentils planting
• By 1902, 94 guano islands were the American dominion — Guano Island Act of 1856 — great fertilizer in an industrial age that needed it
• Navassa Phosphate Company used African Americans from Baltimore to get from Caribbean island — President Harrison defended the black workers after investigation
• 1914: Haber Busch process of synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer replaced guano seafaring expeditions

• Haber also cultivated younger Einstein, but Einstein was a far less committed German than Haber. Haber contributed nitrogen to poison gas for the Nazis, who would use the technology to gas chamber Jews. Haber’s wife Clara was a promising scientist who withered as he rose and then killed herself — she was Clara Immerwahr, whose cousin was, coincidentally this author’s great grandfather 
• Presidents never really lived in log cabin, not even Harrison — though Teddy Roosevelt did as an adult 
• Philadelphia born Owen Wister wrote The Virginian and created the Western novel genre
• Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, presented in his 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” argued that the westward expansion of the United States, particularly the frontier experience, was the primary force shaping American democracy, individualism, and national character. Turner proposed that the frontier acted as a “safety valve,” offering new opportunities and fostering a unique American identity distinct from European influences.
• Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s influence of sea power: where Turner said all the land was accounted for, Mahan said the seas were open and necessary in a newly competitive era
• Why was Spanish American War so quick (10 weeks in 1898)? Cuban, Filipino and to much lesser extent Puerto Rican nationalists had been battling with the Spanish going back decades — they set up a quick American victory but American leaders only wanted to deal with each other white faces
• After the Spanish American War, the Americans had a brief period of pride in empire. Books of that time included Imperial America (1898); The Greater Republic (1899); The Greater United States (1904) and seven other books published in the decade after 1898 with titles that included ” the phrase “Greater America”
• Pre 1898, “America” as a noun was never used, but after Teddy Roosevelt it flowed — America the Beautiful and God Bless America being prominent examples — as the United States no longer fit. What was different about 1898? “It wasn’t the land. It was the people who lived on it”
• After the Mexican War (1846-1848), the U.S. military had conquered Mexico City and could have taken the whole country but John C Calhoun among others said “We have never dreamt of incorporating into the union any but the Caucasian race – the free white race”
• As one newspaper put it “the new border after the Mexican War gave the United States all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people”
• “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”
• William Walker tried to take Nicaragua
• In the 1860s, Ulysses S Grant was open to purchasing the Dominican Republic but Congress blocked it because of its population — Charles Sumner said so on the house floor
• A trilemma: Republicanism, overseas expansion and white supremacy, you can only have two. They could have dropped white supremacy but instead we dropped Republicanism for our overseas territories
• 1901 insular Supreme Court case held that the Constitution only applicable to the states not overseas territories
• Richard Kipling published imperialist poem “White Man’s Burden” in 1899
• Twain became anti imperialist because of the Philippines — but he didn’t vote in 1900, though it was a big election on empire
• Per Ken De bevoise’s estimates, perhaps 600k-775k Philippines died in the war — which would have been more than US Civil war
• But Philippines was unusual — the central goverment lacked full control of Moroland with its Muslim population, and still had active slavery in 1900s 
• 1906 WEB Dubois called a photo of the Bud Dajo massacre “the most illuminating thing I’ve ever seen” because it showed the violence  
• (((The Philippine-American War (1899-1902) has similarities to Vietnam and Iraq, where more-powerful American forces expected swift regime change but confronted a lack of on-the-ground consensus, in contrast with Puerto Rico where more residents were open to American hegemony
• Pedro Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican joined army in patriotism to support independence — he identified as white but a board of doctors said he wasn’t and so should be in a black army regiment.
• Puerto Rico’s Albizu, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Sayyid Qutb and even Gandhi were all exposed to US President Woodrow Wilson blocking commitments for racial equity and distributing colonies post WW1, and this shaped their worldview
• Influential Puerto Rican architect Juan M. Arellano went to Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Drexel University
• Bailey Ashford and hookworm treatment in Puerto Rico: later Rockefeller gave $1m to deworm the south, which effectively ended the scourge but limited funding in Puerto Rico meant it lingered longer (reduced morbidity but not its spread)
• Dusty Rhoades writes a vile letter about Puerto Ricans and nationalism surged including Albizu (“where tyranny is law, revolution is order”). Rhoades vilified in Puerto Rico but back on the mainland his career flourished (“that’s how you hide an empire” the author writes)
• “Albizu‘s birthplace, once known for being ‘delirious’ with enthusiasm for the United States, was now etched in memory as the site of the Ponce massacre. To this day, it remains the bloodiest shooting by police in US history.”
• The UK celebrated empire day, the U.S. introduced flag day
• It is possible to read Margaret Mead’s 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa without knowing the Samoans were American nationals (because we so separated these worlds)
• UK and European colonial powers built prestigious colonial buildings and schools and deployed promising leaders; in contrast, Americans didn’t stay in colonial leadership long, and didn’t get many raw ingredients from colonies, which they viewed as strategic naval bases
• In the 1930s, the isolationist idea of “Fortress America” fueled support to grant Philippines Independence (announced in 1935, completed in 1946, after the Second World War)
• Jon Stewart: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” 
• We know Pearl Harbor but less about Dutch Harbor and Alaska during World War II
• Why did McArthur not react in the Philippines to Pearl Harbor hours earlier? Th Japanese were delayed so they assumed the Americans would be prepared but they were able to continue their plan. 
• Japanese planes dropped menus from the high end Manila hotel — which was whites only and desperate in the hunger of a city under siege
• Manuel Quezon: “ how typically American to arrive in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while her daughter is being raped in the back room” — of Filipino but speaks to many white focus while others suffer
• Bataan Death March (1942)
• In brutal Battle of Manila (May 1945), buildings with residents were blown up to protect U.S. soldiers but the civilians in those buildings were Americans too — even if they weren’t treated that way. Manila was the sixth largest U.S. city
• 1 in 10 U.S. service members in WW2 saw a shot fired in battle — as Neal Stephenson wrote: the US military in World War II was “first and foremost, an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondary a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another and last and least a fighting organization”
• The American style empire: Large swaths of land mattered less than strategic ports 
• Kilroy was here
• Teddy Roosevelt first sitting U.S. President to leave continental U.S., and FDR traveled extensively: “World War II made the United States of planetary presence”
• By WW2, the Mercator Map (originated in 1569)caught derision for its misprojections, so others followed, like the Richard Edward Harrison polar azimuthal projection which formed the UN logo
• The word “global” grows in popularity after WW2: WW1 was a “world” war, WW2 was a global war, a phrase FDR used
• Beate Sirota Gordon, a young woman working for General MacArthur’s headquarters during the post-World War II occupation of Japan, played a crucial role in drafting the Japanese Constitution, particularly in ensuring women’s rights.
• US won WW2 and gave up territory — highly unusually — in 1945, 51% or greater U.S. population was outside the states, in territory and occupations, but by 1960, with Hawaii and Alaska in the union, just 2% of population was outside the states: how did this happen? 
• Two ways: WW2 created anti imperialist systems and culture, and it introduced new ways to project power (230)
• In 1940, 1 in 3 people lived In empire, by 1965 it was 1 in 50
• GI protestors in Manila and elsewhere post WW2: bring us home, don’t meddle in the affairs of other nations (after ww1, most soldiers converted to civilians) . The protests. Quietly worked: rather than 2.5 m soldiers planned post war, the 8m wartime army shrunk down to 1m
• Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico’s first elected governor, won popularity and then broke with Albizu— fought for middle road not independence to keep access to the American market 
• Gag law in Puerto Rico  — nationalists weren’t allowed to fly the Puerto Rican flag
• Marin called Puerto Rico a “butterfly of a new species” after the riots of 1950 let him clear out nationalists
• “Operation Bootstrap” refers to a post-World War II economic development plan for Puerto Rico, aiming to transform the island’s largely agrarian economy into an industrial one, creating a tax haven to lure manufacturers in 1954. That was just 11 years after Life magazine called Puerto Rico an “unsolvable problem.” Life published a story that though poorer than any U.S. state or Mexico, it was growing better than Caribbean peers and so “one of the few spots on the globe that all Americans can feel happy and hopeful about these days”
• On March 1, 1954; Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire inside the US Capitol in Washington DC, injuring five — to this day there’s a bullet hole in the Republican Congressional leadership table
• Albuzu losing his mind in prison and believing he was getting ray guns wrote “We live in the era of the scientific savage… Where all the wisdom of science, mathematics and physics are used for the purposes of assassination”
• New York Times wrote nationalism in Puerto Rico was “about as lunatic a movement as could exist in the world.” Nationalists called terrorists
• Author has several references to Howard Zinn’s People’s History, and this book dives really deep into Philippines and Puerto Rico so it has a feel of that for filling in gaps of American empire history
• LBJ signed a treaty to make clear they weren’t trying to colonize the moon; Congress said the U.S. flag on the moon was only symbolic and not a land grab — that flag was sewn of DuPont nylon 
• WW2: Germany pursued synthetic rubber with one massive bloody investment in IG Farben, whereas U.S. had teams of funded labs working together on many tiny discoveries that led to the moment . (Another example of American military-funded research)
• By 1944, a U.S. rubber plant with 1250 workers made as much rubber as a plantation of 24m trees and 90k workers — one of many natural raw materials the U.S. weaned itself off during WW2 with synthetic science, and it became a reason colonization mattered less
• The United States “replaced colonies with chemistry”
• Jacob Rosin: the synthetic age
• “O God! that whole damned war business is about 999 parts diarrhea and 1 part glory,” wrote Walt Whitman after the Civil War
• In 1904 a Baltimore fire was so big fire trucks came from Philadelphia, Harrisburg, New York, Wilmington and Annapolis but there weren’t standards so their hoses didn’t work or connect to each other
• Hoover, the Quaker champion of standards, was told to be commerce director he only had to turn the lighthouses on at night and put the fish to bed — “the half inch bolt screws onto the half inch nut”
• But across countries standards were harder than in country or in empire
• 60 degree screws and A440 hertz note 1: American standards overwhelmed others, a kind of de facto empire
• Winston Churchill: “The empires of the future are empires of the mind”
• The English language was forced by the UK in the colonial era onto its subjects, but it was air traffic controllers, scientists and then the internet that cemented English as the worlds dominant lingua franca
• Stuart Barber: strategic island concept
• Albizu: “the Yankees are interested in the cage but not the birds” ((American empire was pointillist in tiny naval and air bases without large population so it was not high profile — not the colonialists of old time)
• Gabriel Chin: “John McCain was born 11 months and a hundred yards short of citizenship” — Panama Canal Zone in 1936, a year before a 1937 law; reminded Barry Goldwater born in Arizona territory