This sort of expansion was typical of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When countries got more powerful, they generally got bigger. One might have expected, then, that the United States would keep growing. Indeed, by the end of World War II it had claimed a lot of territory: its Pacific empire had been reclaimed, it held thousands of military bases around the world, and it occupied parts of Korea, Germany, and Austria, and all of Japan. Adding up the land under U.S. jurisdiction—colonies and occupations alike—by the end of 1945 the Greater United States included some 135 million people living outside the mainland.33
But what’s remarkable is what happened next. Rather than converting its occupations to annexations (as it had after the 1898 war with Spain), it did something virtually unprecedented. It won a war and gave up territory. The Philippines, its largest colony, got independence. The occupations wrapped up speedily, and only one—of a set of lightly populated islands in Micronesia—led to annexation. Other territories, though they weren’t granted independence, received new statuses. Puerto Rico became a “commonwealth,” which ostensibly replaced a coercive relationship with a consenting one. Hawai‘i and Alaska, after some delay, became states, overcoming decades of racist determination to keep them out of the union.
This is the third act, and it raises a question. Why did the United States, at the peak of its power, distance itself from colonial empire? I explore that question at length because it’s tremendously important yet seldom asked.
One part of the answer is that colonized subjects resisted, forcing empire into retreat. This happened both within the Greater United States, leading to status changes in the four largest colonies, and outside it, where anti-imperialism impeded further colonial conquest.
Another part has to do with technology. During the Second World War, the United States honed an extraordinary suite of technologies that gave it many of the benefits of empire without having to actually hold colonies. Plastics and other synthetics allowed it to replace tropical products with man-made substitutes. Airplanes, radio, and DDT enabled it to move its goods, ideas, and people into foreign countries easily without annexing them. Similarly, the United States managed to standardize many of its objects and practices—from screw threads to road signs to the English language—across political borders, again gaining influence in places it didn’t control. Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization.
Globalization is a fashionable word, and it’s easy to speak of it in vague terms—to talk of increasingly better technologies drawing a disparate world together. But those new technologies didn’t just crop up. Many were developed by the U.S. military in a short burst of time in the 1940s, with the goal of giving the United States a new relationship to territory. Dramatically, and in just a few years, the military built a world-spanning logistical network that was startling in how little it depended on colonies. It was also startling in how much it centered the world’s trade, transport, and communication on one country, the United States.
Yet even in this age of globalization, territory has not gone away. Not only does the United States continue to hold part of its colonial empire (containing millions), it also claims numerous small dots on the map. 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.34
These tiny specks—Howland Island and the like—are the foundations of U.S. world power. They serve as staging grounds, launchpads, storage sites, beacons, and laboratories. They make up what I call (building on a concept from the historian and cartographer Bill Rankin) a “pointillist empire.”35 Today, that empire extends all over the planet.
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None of this, however—not the large colonies, small islands, or military bases—has made much of a dent on the mainland mind. One of the truly distinctive features of the United States’ empire is how persistently ignored it has been. Apart from the brief moment after 1898 when the country’s imperial dimensions were on proud display, much of its history has taken place offstage.
This is, it’s worth emphasizing, unique. The British weren’t confused as to whether there was a British Empire. They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate it. France didn’t forget that Algeria was French. It is only the United States that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders.
The reason isn’t hard to guess. The country perceives itself to be a republic, not an empire. It was born in an anti-imperialist revolt and has fought empires ever since, from Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich and the Japanese Empire to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. It even fights empires in its dreams. Star Wars, a saga that started with a rebellion against the Galactic Empire, is one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.
This self-image of the United States as a republic is consoling, but it’s also costly. Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies, in the occupation zones, and around the military bases. The logo map has relegated them to the shadows, which are a dangerous place to live. At various times, the 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.
The logo map carries a cost for mainlanders, too. It gives them a truncated view of their own history, one that excludes part of their country. It is an important part. As I seek to reveal, a lot has happened in the territories, occurrences highly relevant to mainlanders. The overseas parts of the United States have triggered wars, brought forth inventions, raised up presidents, and helped define what it means to be “American.” Only by including them in the picture do we see a full portrait of the country—not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is.
A NOTE ON LANGUAGE
The chief argument of this book is that we should think of the United States differently. Rather than conceiving of it as a contiguous blob, we should take seriously its overseas holdings, from large colonies to tiny islands. For that reason, I use the United States to refer to the entire polity. The contiguous portion I call the mainland, which is what many in the territories call it.
That usage is not universal. Puerto Rican nationalists, for example, often refer to the United States and Puerto Rico as distinct countries to signal their rejection of the legitimacy of U.S. rule. I’ve declined to follow their lead, because I worry that it confuses things on the other end, making the United States seem as if it were merely a union of states. Such usage can obscure the country’s imperial dimensions.
Colonialism imprints foreign names on people and places. What to call the locales and populations that have come under it can thus be a politically charged question. I write Hawai‘i, with an ‘okina, a Hawaiian-language consonant pronounced as a glottal stop, rather than Hawaii. This follows local use and the recommendation of the Hawai‘i Board on Geographic Names (but there is no ‘okina in Hawaiian). Also in keeping with local use, I’ve placed accents over the vowels in Puerto Rican names (José Trías Monge) but not Filipino ones (Jose Laurel). I write Puerto Rico even when discussing the colony during its first three decades under U.S. rule, a period when Washington insisted on the anglicized spelling, Porto Rico. Activists protesting the military presence on Guam have recently begun to refer to the island by its Chamoru name, Guåhan, but as this practice is not yet widespread, I have stuck with Guam. Finally, though it is often assumed that the term Indian is a slur and Native American must be used instead, Native American communities and organizations often use both. I use the terms interchangeably here, though I use more specific names (e.g., Cherokee, Ojibwe) whenever possible.
PART I
THE COLONIAL EMPIRE
1
THE FALL AND RISE OF DANIEL BOONE
The thirteen colonies that would make up the United States declared independence from Britain in 177
6. Freedom, however, takes many forms. Just a year earlier, the hunter Daniel Boone and thirty or so followers asserted an independence of a different sort.1 Plagued by debt, Boone left his home on the Yadkin River in North Carolina and wandered west. His party took advantage of a convenient notch in the Appalachian mountain range, the Cumberland Gap. They traveled some two hundred miles in a month, cutting through thick brush, cane, and reed in search of better land.
Boone and his followers found what they sought in the plains of Kentucky. The Shawnees who lived there had carefully culled the area’s trees, letting the grass grow high and the herbivores graze. For men used to a hardscrabble life, this was paradise. “So rich a soil we had never seen before;2 covered with clover in full bloom,” gaped one of Boone’s axmen. “The woods were abounding in wild game.” They named their new settlement Boonesborough, after the man who had brought them there.
Oases in the desert often vanish upon inspection, and it didn’t take long for Boone’s followers to reconsider their rapture. The teeming meadows were no mirage, but those meadows were the hunting grounds of the Shawnees, whose presence made it difficult for Boone’s party to venture beyond Boonesborough’s defended perimeter. Confined to their few rudimentary structures and beset on all sides, many of the town’s residents lost heart and returned home before the year was out.
Boonesborough’s achievements were, on the face of it, modest. Yet if the what of Boonesborough was underwhelming, the where carried a larger significance. The settlement was situated on the far side of the Appalachians, which for more than a century had formed a barrier—in law and practice—to British settlement in North America. By blazing his trail through the wilderness, Boone had opened a channel through which hundreds of thousands of whites would soon pour, dragging enslaved blacks along with them. Boone wasn’t exactly the “first white man of the West,”3 as one of his biographers insisted. But he was an early drop from a faucet that was about to be turned on full blast.
For European intellectuals, the rough-hewn, frontier-dwelling Boone was catnip. Enlightenment philosophes regarded him as man in his natural state, Romantics as a refugee from civilization. An obscure biographical account of Boone, originally published as an appendix to a history of Kentucky, made the rounds in Europe, where it was republished and speedily translated into French and German.
Boone showed up in European literature, too.4 The British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft had an affair with one of Boone’s acquaintances and, with him, published a fictionalized account of Boone’s life. The French Romantic François-René de Chateaubriand lifted passages from Boone’s biography for his influential epic, Les Natchez, about a Frenchman living among the North American Indians. Lord Byron, the leading poet of the age, devoted seven stanzas to Boone (the “happiest amongst mortals anywhere”) in his poem Don Juan.
Yet, oddly, Boone saw almost none of this. Though celebrated abroad, he wasn’t much revered at home during his lifetime.5 He died at the old age of eighty-five in 1820. That was the same decade Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, both, as it happened by near-inconceivable coincidence, on the same day—the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The country went understandably crazy when Jefferson and Adams died. “Had the horses and the chariot of fire descended to take up the patriarchs,”6 a New York paper wrote, “it might have been more wonderful, but not more glorious.”
But for Boone’s death? Nothing of the sort. He died in the Territory of Missouri, west of St. Louis. He had no money and no land—he was living as a pensioner on his son’s small estate. Territorial legislators in Missouri wore black armbands in Boone’s honor, but the eastern papers took well over a month to even acknowledge his death, which they generally did with short notices. He was buried in an unmarked grave.
How could that happen? Why didn’t someone do something? Did the leading men of the country not know about Boone? They knew. Did they not understand what he represented? They understood.
They just didn’t like it.
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The disregard in which Daniel Boone was held may come as a surprise. The United States, as the story is often told, was a buoyantly expansive nation from the start. Its founders had wrested liberty from an oppressive empire—turning subjects into citizens and colonies into states—and were eager to push their republican form of government westward across the continent, from sea to shining sea. Men like Daniel Boone, it would seem, were vital instruments of that national mission.
Yet Boone’s path was strewn with obstacles. The British had set the ridge of the Appalachians as the boundary to white settlement, making Boone’s journey west a crime. The end of British rule did little to improve Boone’s standing. The founders viewed frontiersmen like him with open suspicion. They were the nation’s “refuse” (wrote Ben Franklin),7 “no better than carnivorous animals”8 (J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur), or “white savages”9 (John Jay). George Washington warned, after the revolution, of the “settling, or rather overspreading the Western Country … by a parcel of banditti,10 who will bid defiance to all authority.” To prevent this, he proposed drawing a settlement boundary, just as the British had, and prosecuting as a felon any citizen who crossed it.
Part of the objection was social; the founders were men of culture and sophistication who found rough frontier life troubling. Yet there was a deeper issue involved. As Boonesborough’s settlers had discovered, the United States wasn’t the only country with claim to the land west of the Appalachians. Native peoples—organized as nations, tribes, confederacies, and other durable polities—had their own cartography, their own way of mapping North America. And, in the late eighteenth century, they could back their maps with force.
This was the raw nerve Daniel Boone had touched. By hauling white settlers west, he was invading Indian lands. That meant fighting, fighting of the sort that might easily draw the United States government in. It also meant a discomfiting blurring of the lines between European and Native. Boone had killed Indians, been captured by them many times, and seen a brother and two sons die by Indian hands. But he had also, during one of his stints in captivity, been adopted into a Shawnee family, receiving the name Sheltowee (meaning “Big Turtle”) and becoming “exceedingly familiar and friendly,” as he put it,11 with his “new parents, brothers, sisters, and friends.”
This was exactly the sort of business that put Washington in favor of enforcing a British-style settlement boundary.12 The matter wasn’t merely philosophical for him; it was also personal. Much of Washington’s wealth lay in large tracts of western land. That land would hold its value only if he could control its sale and settlement. “Banditti” such as Boone, who took land without consulting its eastern owners, were a threat. Boone himself was a particular threat, since his claims on Kentucky conflicted with Washington’s own.
Paper claims to distant land, such as Washington’s, were hard to maintain from the East. During the Revolutionary War, Washington had left his considerable estate in the unsteady hands of his distant cousin Lund Washington. Under Lund’s less than entirely watchful eye, squatters took up residence on Washington’s western holdings (not the Kentucky claims, but others farther north). Irate, Washington set out to put things right, crossing the Appalachians himself on a sort of landlord’s vengeance mission.
The expedition did little to temper his disdain for frontiersmen. He recorded that their clashes with Indians had incited “murders, and general dissatisfaction.”13 They “labour very little,” he harrumphed,14 and the merest “touch of a feather” would turn their loyalties away from the United States.
Washington set his affairs in order, but he remained doubtful about westerners’ political allegiances. His fears were confirmed in the 1790s, when backcountry men in Pennsylvania refused to pay a federal tax on alcohol and threatened armed secession. It was the Boston Tea Party all over again, this time with whiskey. Yet, notwithstanding his own recent leadership of a revolution against the financial machinations of a di
stant government, Washington’s sympathy for the rebels quickly ran dry. Their opposition, he complained to Jefferson, had “become too open, violent and serious to be longer winked at.”15
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.”16
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Washington’s impatience with frontiersmen didn’t mean that he opposed expansion. In the long term, he depended on it, both to strengthen the country and to profit from his western estates. The issue was the short term. The country was vast, but its government was weak. Squatters who rushed over the mountains were impossible to govern, and the wars they inevitably started were expensive to fight. Washington thus insisted that settlement proceed in a “compact” manner,17 under elite control. That way, the frontier would be not a refuge for masterless men like Boone but the forefront of the march of civilization, advancing at a stately pace.
To realize their vision, the founders created a distinct political category for the frontier: territory. The revolution had been fought by a union of states, but those states’ borders became ill-defined and even overlapped as they reached westward. Rather than dividing the frontier among the states, the republic’s leaders brokered deals by which none of the Atlantic states would extend to the Mississippi, which marked the western edge of the country. Instead, western land would go to the federal government. It would be administered not as states, but as territories.
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