What I Am Reading: “How to Hide an Empire” by Daniel Immerwahr

This book was about the history of America's relationships with its overseas territories. This includes our five current territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Historically, it includes former territories that have since become independent, like the Phillippines, or become states, like Alaska and Hawai'i. It also includes the spread of airstrips and military bases, on our smaller, unincorporated and unorganized islands or in other countries, that make up the modern "pointillist empire." The book is about how U.S. policy has affected these territories, but also how these territories have affected the history of the U.S. as a whole, especially the mainland, represented by the "logo map" that does not include any overseas possessions.

First, just my notes on the book more generally: it was pretty good, especially in the second half when it covered the post-WW2 history of U.S. projection of power through bases. It was a popular history, so naturally I was at least mildly annoyed throughout by flashes of lightness in tone, but that is my problem. It raised a lot of anecdotes that I wanted to pursue on my own, which is either laudable or annoying for not going into more detail. I do wish it had gone into a little more detail on the history of our most famous acquisitions, namely the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the purchase of Alaska from the Russians. Finally, it did not mention my pet interest, the American presence in Antarctica, nor does it have anything to say about the District of Columbia. I was glad for this book though because our overseas territories have received heightened attention during the Trump years, between his indifference to natural disaster in Puerto Rico, North Korean threats to fire nuclear weapons at Guam, Democratic scheming to add new Senate seats while we have the chance, or the puzzling interest in purchasing Greenland.

I said that the book was about the overseas territories, but the first couple of chapters cover the territory on the U.S. mainland as the country was expanding. Contrary to later mythologizing about the frontier, the founding generation viewed frontiersmen as backwoods squatters stirring up trouble on the fringes of civilization; they too wanted to expand, but under a slow, centralized process controlled by national elites. Under the eventual Northwest Ordinance, Congress could accept new territories, but it also set these territories on unequal footing with the states from day 1. The book covers the ever-shrinking territory specifically set aside for Native Americans (not to be confused with reservations in existing states), eventually making up only half of Oklaholma and failing in an attempt to be admitted as its own state of Sequoyah in the first decade of the 20th Century. Like later leaders in the Phillippines and Puerto Rico (Quezon, Muñoz Marí), leader of the Cherokee Nation John Ross attempted for many years to thread the needle between working with the United States government and rebuffing their encroachment.

America's first overseas territories came in the pursuit of guano, nitrogen-rich bird shit used to fertilize crops on an industrial scale. In 1856, Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, allowing citizens to take possession of guano-rich islands (found in tropical latitudes) in the name of the United States/ The country would come to possess 94 islands by 1902, and put Black or Hawaiian workers to miserable labor extracting the guano. It was because of resulting labor unrest, on the island of Navassa in the Caribbean in 1889, that the Supreme Court ruled that these islands were indeed under the  U.S. jurisdiction (condemning the Black rebels to death, though they were pardoned by President Harrison).

Many Presidents did their best to identify themselves with the expanding frontier ("Log Cabins and Hard Cider!") but the only one to have any semblance of a career there before his political career was Theodore Roosevelt, who ranched in the Dakota Badlands for a few years following the death of his wife (admittedly after he had been a New York state legislator). As recounted by Gore Vidal, chronicler of American empire, these exploits were not as impressive as later presented; but Roosevelt would of course go on to play a major role in the only large-scale territorial expansion of the American Empire through his patronage of the Spanish-American War. He was influenced by theories of the time, Mahan's prescient theory on the importance of sea power and Frederick Jackson Turner's theory on the importance of the frontier to the American character. Though anti-imperialists in Congress prevented the annexation of Cuba, the war did lead to U.S. control over The Phillippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. The Phillippine annexation was of course not happy, with America immediately embroiled in a colonial war that soon took on the brutal, repressive characteristics of any European war of empir.

After the war was one of the only times that American popular culture acknowledged itself as an empire, with maps reprinted to include new U.S. possessions, and not just the "logo map." Far from territory-hungry, the U.S. had turned down previous opportunities to expand overseas, including William Walker's pre-Civil War filibustering in Nicaragua and multiple offers to buy the Dominican Republic. Now, gluttinously, the U.S. proceeded to annex Hawai'i and Samoa. In fact, a considerable percentage of the U.S. population lived in its territories, especially during the span when these encompassed the Phillippines. In 1940, 12.6% of the overall U.S. population were territorial subjects; and Manila was the sixth-largest city in the country. Through Congressional decisions and court cases, the new territories underwent a sorting process, whereby some were "incorprorated" and others remained "unincorporated." I wish that the book went into more detail on this and the different subdivisions of territory, but the Insular Cases built on the previous Guano Island Act and subsequent cases to note that the unincorporated territories were "appurtenant" to the United States, and thus the people living there didn't automatically have the full coverage of the Constitution, even if they were citizens (which not all were). The incorporated territories went on to be states, and the unincorporated territories did not. The other territories went on to gain more rights of citizenship, but these rights were statutory, not constitutional, and could be revoked as they were granted, by an act of Congress.

Perhaps because of the brutality and senseless death of the Phillippine-American War, the desire for empire had cooled by the nineteen-teens, and more indirect control (though still military) methods were used to keep America's disobedient Caribbean and Central American neighbors in line. The territories receded from public consciousness. In another of his bids to be one of the most interesting and frustrating Presidents, Woodrow Wilson was better for the territories than his Republican predecessors, as he sped up the Philippinization of that archipelago's civil service, supported a failed bill promising independence, and brought a legislature to Puerto Rico. Wilson also expanded by purchasing the Danish West Indies, now the U.S. Virgin Islands. He did not satisfy all the desires of anti-imperialists, especially in Paris in 1919. Actually, by then the anti-imperialists had already had their defining election, right after the Spanish-American War, when this cause was a major issue for the William Jennings Bryan campaign. Emilio Aguinaldo even tailored his insurrection, as Ho Chi Minh and others would in subsequent years, for maximum electoral impact on the mainland. It didn't work, and Bryan lost to McKinley for the second time, in an electoral validation of American empire. Bryan would, however, go on to be Wilson's first Secretary of State.

The book has a lot to say about American oppression and racism in the Phillippines (and the other territories, of course). It also brings in some unexpected elements, like Daniel Burnham's City Beautiful-work on Manila, where he faced far less local pushback than he did in Chicago city planning. His plan, made rapidly and with many concessions to white supremacy, was enacted for years by Insular Architect William Parsons. This included not only work in Manila, but the creation of Baguio as a "summer capital." This work would later be taken over with great zeal by Phillippino Arcadio Arellano, who switched from old Spanish Mission style to American Neoclassical. This is a good case study in subaltern studies of either the rise of colonized people or their conformity to the paths set out by their imperial overlords. “…in beating imperialists at their own game, Arellano was also playing their game.” (Ch. 8) As I've noted previously when shoehorning a note on fascist architecture in Eritrea into a discussion of the Ethiopian War, colonized people often have interesting relationships to the architecture of their colonizers.

Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico in its first decades of U.S. ownership, American philanthropists tackled public health campaigns against hookworm and other diseases for many years; but these backfired when Rockefeller Foundation leader Dr. Cornelius Rhoades accidentally left out an incriminating letter discussing unethical and race-based human experimentation and alleged attempts to kill his own patients. This turned into a major scandal remembered in Puerto Rico to this day, though forgotten in the mainland as Rhoads went on to experiment with chemical weapons on "volunteer" American soldiers during WW2 and do early chemotherapy research after that.

The PR affair, though it never went to trial, was a major catalyst to the Puerto Rican independence movement, led in part by Pedro Albizu Campos, who had actually enlisted during WW1, but become disillusioned with America subsequently. Despite this history, Puerto Rico would be used as a laboratory for other medical breakthroughs through the years (due to mainland regulations not always applying), including the birth control pill.
This was a scandal of the New Deal years, though these years, and Franklin Roosevelt's administration as a whole, would see a major change in relations between the overseas territories and the U.S. government. Imperialist sentiment was already running low and had been for decades, but isolationism in the face of the Japanese threat saw serious efforts to jettison the Philippines to independence. Phillippine leader Manuel Quezon tried to thread the needle of agitation for increased freedom and perhaps eventual independence with the necessity of American economic support and defense, as did similar moderate seeker of "liberty" but not independence Luis Muñoz Marín in Puerto Rico. In fact, in 1934 Congress voted to begin the Phillippine independence process.

On the Administration side, much of the territorial beat was handled by head of the Interior Department's Division of Territories Ernest Gruening. He had a good resume, trained as a physician and an activist and journalist for the anti-imperialist cause, but this cause had largely focused in his lifetime on preventing the acquisition of new territories, not the freedom of existing ones. Nevertheless, under Gruening, the government started quietly reasserting control over many guano islands it had let lapse after the invention of synthetic fertilizer, for eventual use as  radio and airbases. He had control over all territories and was also Governor of Puerto Rico; Guam and American Samoa, however, remained under control of the Navy. Eventually, not receiving much institutional support in his position from Roosevelt or Ickes, Gruening was sent to govern Alaska. Interest in territories kicked into high gear when the Japanese finally made their move, but by then it was too late.

Another key figure in this era was Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I was trained by M*A*S*H to think of him as a comical figure, but he was in some ways an impressive political leader. A class in college taught me that he was very fair-minded and progressive while governing occupied Japan (I'll mention that now so I don't have to mention it later), and he was very committed to the defense of the Phillippines, where his father had been stationed during the colonial war, to the point of leaving the U.S army to run the Phillippine Commonwealth's army. However, this didn't count for much when war finally came, and his airforce was destroyed on the ground despite the advanced warning of Pearl Harbor. He retreated to Australia with the Phillippines government. Meanwhile, the Japanese also seized the westernmost Aleutian Islands in Alaska. The remaining Aleuts were evacuated and interned on the mainland. Gruening had tried to prevent this, so was caught flat-footed when the military forced the issue. Gruening generally clashed with the military and succeeded in preventing the harsh martial law that was enacted in Hawai'i long past the point of a military threat, but as a consequence Alaska had to deal with heavy censorship. He also rallied Alaskan Native populations into a very effective defense militia, spiting the military which of course did not want to arm any non-white peoples if they could help it. Gruening would later be elected one of Alaska's first Senators, then lose renomination to the abysmal Mike Gravel during the Vietnam era. 

Overall, despite the Japanese promise of anti-Western activity and freedom (promises not lived up to by their repression in the Phillippines), territorial people were very loyal to the U.S. during WW2. They were not always repaid for this loyalty, including by the excessive shelling of Manila that brought many civilian casualties. The U.S. did live up to its pre-war promise of Phillippine freedom.

This transitions us to the second half of the book, which is very easily summarized. Unlike previous victorious powers, the United States did not enact a massive land grab. Why? They didn't need to. New technology in synthetics and "world-proofing," improvements in logistics (especially manufacturing and air power), and the adoption of American standards and English-use by other countries meant that the U.S. did not need to control territory directly in order to have power over it, or benefit from it economically. The American empire became what cartographer Bill Rankin called a pointillist empire: impressive air power meant that we only needed a network of bases to project our power anywhere in the world, emanating from these "points" on the map. Some of these bases are on islands we own (many of which are unincorporated and unorganized territories), and some are leased from our allies. We became what I think of as a kind of airborne thalassocracy, more similar to old spice empires with their trading posts than to Gilded Age colonial empires dividing the map. Radio, airplanes, and ICBMs got the job done, and that continues to the War on Terror and its black sites and drone strikes to this day. In fact, as scholar Robert Pape argues, these bases are one of the leading causes of terrorism, as local populations view them as foreign occupations. However, Immerwahr also notes bases on foreign soil as a driver of local culture and innovation, including the rock scene near the base in Liverpool, the tech contracting in Japan that led to Sony, and, um, the construction contracts on Saudi Arabian bases that enriched Osama bin Laden's father.

This does still leave our existing territories. Phillippine independence came soon after the war; Manuel Quezon had died in exile in Australia before American forces returned, but subsequent Phillippine leaders, such as Jose P. Laurel, included those who had collaborated with the Japanese. In Puerto Rico, meanwhile, the independence movement would encompass violent tactics, including an attempt to assassinate Harry Truman, then repression at the hands of the Muñoz Marín government in an effort to restore order and American favor.  Muñoz Marín led an effort to become "self-governing" through passage of a new constitution and the status as a "commonwealth" (another political distinction I wish the book summarized). Many of their population emigrated to New York; and after various labor loopholes were closed a couple of decades ago their economy, of course, continues to struggle. The Chamorro people of Guam often oppose military expansion, but their economy is dependent on their military status. Hawai'i and Alaska parlayed their wartime difficulties, including at the hands of their own government, into statehood in 1959, an overlooked triumph of the Civil Rights era that has sent many non-white members to Congress. The Northern Marianas would become a territory in 1986, after a long journey involving Spanish colonization, Wilhelmine German possession, a Japanese mandate from the League of Nations, and an American mandate from the United Nations. They join, as noted, Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, places that are often overlooked or even the subject of government oppression, but are still a critical part of the United States.