How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  Many Puerto Ricans believed that they stood to gain by replacing Spain with the United States.2 Their island was far more reliant on trade than the Philippines was. Economically, U.S. rule would grant access to better markets. Politically, Puerto Ricans expected to gain autonomy. They understood the United States to be a grand federation—a “republic of republics”—and hoped to join it on equal terms, as the western territories had. Politicians formed parties, the Partido Republicano and the Partido Federal, both of which sought statehood. As the Federalist platform put it, Puerto Rico was to be “a prosperous and happy country in the shadow of the American flag.”3

  To Pedro Albizu Campos,4 a young boy at the time, all this must have made an impression. He grew up in Ponce, the center of the U.S. occupation. The locals there were “the most friendly souls in the world,”5 wrote a U.S. journalist—they were “delirious” with enthusiasm for the United States.

  Albizu’s father had gone down to the port to welcome the arriving troops and soon found work as a customs official for the new government.6 Though Albizu had little contact with his father, the boy also seemed eager. He “appeared to be a lover of everything American,”7 recalled his school’s superintendent. A teacher remembered how Albizu would stay after class to talk with his mainland teachers, and that he would visit their homes.8 Eventually the superintendent arranged for a scholarship to send him to the mainland, to the University of Vermont.9

  From Vermont, Albizu transferred to Harvard, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and, later, a law degree. He flourished there. “Pete,”10 as he was known to his English-speaking friends, was a popular student, with a reputation as a gifted speaker. He joined clubs, most notably the Cosmopolitan Club, an organization for Harvard’s foreign and international-minded students.

  The Cosmopolitan Club was many rungs below such tony clubs as the Porcellian and the Hasty Pudding—Teddy Roosevelt’s haunts. Yet it was, in the judgment of Harvard’s president, the most interesting club on campus.11 Its members came from all over the map: China, Germany,12 Korea, France, Liberia, Japan, South Africa, British Guiana, and beyond.

  Misfits in WASP-y Cambridge, such men were nevertheless the hyper-elite of their home countries. When Albizu was elected as one of the club’s two vice presidents in 1914, the other vice president was T. V. Soong, later reputed to be the world’s richest man. One of Soong’s sisters was about to marry Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the Chinese revolution. Another would marry Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Republic of China (first on the mainland, then Taiwan) from 1928 to 1975.

  Albizu served as president of the Cosmopolitan Club in his senior year. It was an honor, but it came at exactly the wrong time, for midway through Albizu’s term, the United States entered the First World War.

  It couldn’t have been easy for the Cosmopolitan Club’s members—pacifists and foreigners in an era of increasingly belligerent nationalism. Around them, every taint of foreign loyalty was being aggressively purged. At the nearby Boston Symphony Orchestra,13 the German-born conductor was deported, dozens of German musicians were interned, and even Germanic compositions were shunned.

  The Cosmopolitan Club was full of Germans. Worse, one of its most devoted faculty allies had been the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg,14 a German citizen whose over-the-top defenses of his homeland had turned him into a national villain and campus embarrassment. It was doubtless a relief to the Harvard administration when Münsterberg died suddenly in late 1916 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Not only was Albizu president of the Cosmopolitan Club, he had publicly identified himself with pacifism. He’d spoken out against Harvard students’ participation in summer military-preparedness camps.15 And he’d served on the council of the International Polity Club,16 a peace organization that had invited Münsterberg to give a political speech at a time when the professor was a pariah.

  All that, though, had been back when the United States was a mere onlooker. Once it entered the war, Albizu faced a stark choice. He could stick with his pacifism or stand with his country, but not both.

  He collected his thoughts in a letter to The Harvard Crimson. “When the Spanish-American war broke out, Porto Ricans looked to this country as their liberator,17 and a wave of Americanism swept across the country,” he wrote. “We welcomed the American flag in 1898 because we believed it, and still believe it, to be a symbol of democracy and justice.”

  His course, then, was clear. “Gentlemen, let me assure you and the American people of our loyalty to the United States,” he continued. “We detest German tyranny and arrogance, and we will give good account of ourselves in actual voluntary military co-operation with the United States.”

  Three weeks later, Albizu joined the army.

  *

  Pedro Albizu Campos’s faith in the United States was striking, but he had reason for it. Whatever empire fever had gripped the country in 1898 seemed to be subsiding. The scandals and sheer length of the Philippine War had wearied even the most ardent imperialists. In 1907 Theodore Roosevelt himself called the Philippines a “heel of Achilles” and suggested to Taft that the colony be prepared for independence.18 Even Emilio Aguinaldo allowed that by this time, the United States had begun to “sober up.”19

  Indeed, empire could seem, from the mainland, to be a regrettable drunken binge, best never spoken of. In 1898 the colonies were headline news, but by the 1910s, even with the fighting still ongoing in Moroland, empire was back-page stuff at best. In 1913 the reliably imperialist journal The Outlook (Theodore Roosevelt was an editor),20 while reporting on the Bud Bagsak battle, felt a need to acknowledge that its readers may be surprised to learn that the war was still happening.

  First Lieutenant Pedro Albizu Campos

  The contrast with Britain is telling. After Queen Victoria’s death, in 1901, celebrations of “Empire Day” began on Victoria’s birthday throughout the British Empire. It became an official holiday in 1916. In the colonies and in the British Isles there were parades, hymns, and speeches. “We were constantly reminded by our teachers that May 24th was Empire Day,”21 one woman from Derby remembered. “The red parts of the globe were proudly pointed out to us.” Children dressed in costumes from the different colonies.

  The United States had its own patriotic holiday. It started in the schools and, like Empire Day, became an official holiday in 1916. But Flag Day, as it was called, was not about empire. It was, President Woodrow Wilson explained, an opportunity for people “to gather together in united demonstration of their feeling as a Nation” and show that “America is indivisible.”22 Whereas British children were made to examine the world map, U.S. children venerated the national flag, which had a star for each state but no symbol for territories.

  If U.S. teachers had pulled out their maps, as many surely did, it’s not clear what they would have found on them. The “Greater United States” maps in vogue a decade earlier were no doubt still hanging on some classroom walls, but by 1916 few such maps were being newly commissioned. Cartographers had returned to the logo maps, showing only the states.

  Nationalism was seizing the country, all the more so as the First World War approached. And as the idea of the nation—a union of states sharing a culture, language, and history—grew in prominence, the colonies seemed more distant and nebulous, literally vanishing from maps and atlases. For the guano islands, the disappearance was more than cartographic. The State Department stopped insisting on its claims to those uninhabited islands and allowed many to slip unnoticed into foreign hands.23 Other territories simply received less attention, from Washington and from everywhere else on the mainland.

  They lay, as Wilson put it, “outside the charmed circle of our own national life.”24

  *

  Helping to brush empire under the rug was the fact that the annexations had largely stopped. One reason why both imperialists and anti-imperialists had been so impassioned is that they imagined the country’s pre-1898 borders to be a dam: once it burst, an unending flood of conquests woul
d follow. It was precisely to prevent that from happening that anti-imperialists in Congress had passed their law strictly limiting what the United States could do with Cuba. It prohibited the exercise of “sovereignty, jurisdiction or control” over the island, “except for pacification.”25

  But if expansionists had been stymied in Cuba, they weren’t entirely defeated. The law prohibited the U.S. jurisdiction over Cuba except for the purpose of “pacification.” And who was to say when Cuba was pacified?

  As it turned out, that question had an answer. The man who decided when Cuba was pacified was its military governor, none other than Leonard Wood, Roosevelt’s fellow Rough Rider and (later) the orchestrator of the Bud Dajo Massacre in the Philippines. As Wood saw it, Cuba wouldn’t be pacified until it had a stable government. And what was a stable government? One in which “money can be borrowed at a reasonable rate of interest” and “capital is willing to invest” was Wood’s definition.26 He wrote to McKinley: “When people ask me what I mean by stable government, I tell them ‘Money at six percent.’”

  In fact, the McKinley administration wanted more than that. It wanted to ensure that U.S. property claims were protected (a serious concern, given that the Cuban revolutionaries had torched sugar plantations), and it wanted the right to intervene if Cuban politics started looking wobbly. Using the threat of continued military occupation as leverage, Wood got the Cuban legislature to agree to both demands—not only agree to them but write them into law. For more than thirty years the Cuban constitution contained an astonishing clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba (which it did, four times).

  Cuba also agreed, as part of the price of getting Wood to leave, to lease a forty-five-square-mile port to the United States for military use. Guantánamo Bay, as the leased land was called, would technically remain Cuban territory, but the United States would have “complete jurisdiction and control” over it.27

  This was, to put it mildly, an extraordinary deal. It gave the United States many of the benefits of colonization without the responsibility. Nobody had sought this arrangement—it was a work-around designed to circumvent the restrictions anti-imperialists had enacted. But it opened a fork in history: the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Guam went one way; Cuba went another.

  The longer the Philippine War groaned on, the better the Cuban path looked to would-be imperialists. Though nominally independent, Cuba was easily absorbed into the U.S. sphere of influence.28 North Americans owned its sugar fields, its mines, its tobacco industry, its banks, and much of its land. Young Cubans learned English and played baseball.

  Even better, Cuba avoided the industrial-grade violence that scarred the Philippines. Or, at least, it avoided such violence at the hands of the United States. In 1912, the year before John Pershing’s troops slaughtered hundreds of Moros on the slopes of Bud Bagsak, Cuba encountered its own diffident subjects. Afro-Cubans,29 who had been excluded from national politics, took up arms, disrupting production in one province.

  At the behest of U.S. investors, who feared for their property, President Taft dispatched marines to Guantánamo Bay and assembled a large naval force in the area. But those ships and marines saw no combat. It was the Cuban army that attacked the Afro-Cubans, killing thousands in a war that lasted months.

  The Cuban model resonated. When the Roosevelt administration sought a transoceanic canal to connect its Atlantic trade to its Pacific trade (larger now that the United States had Pacific territories), it eyed the Panama isthmus in Colombia. But it neither bought nor conquered it. Instead, Roosevelt’s government encouraged Panamanian nationalists to secede from Colombia, and then he negotiated for a small zone in which to build the canal. The U.S. lease was perpetual, and within the zone, the treaty gave the United States “all the rights,30 power, and authority” it would possess “if it were the sovereign of the territory.” But, as in Guantánamo Bay, the United States wasn’t the sovereign—technically.

  Roosevelt was just getting started. In 1903 the Dominican Republic’s finances collapsed. Its president, Carlos Morales, intimated that he would welcome annexation by the United States—the second time that country had offered itself up. A decade earlier, Roosevelt would have jumped at Morales’s offer. But now, exhausted by the Philippine War, he wasn’t interested. “I have about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end to,” he said.31

  Instead, Roosevelt made a Cuba-style deal. His government would gain temporary control of Dominican finances (thus ensuring repayment of the debt to U.S. banks) in exchange for defending the Morales government from rebels and external enemies. U.S. interests would be protected, and the Dominican Republic would remain independent.

  The ploy was used repeatedly, in country after country around the Caribbean. The United States seized the levers of finance and trade but left sovereignty formally intact. “Dollar diplomacy” was the polite name for this, though “gunboat diplomacy” was the more accurate euphemism. To ensure political and financial “stability,”32 U.S. troops entered Cuba (four times), Nicaragua (three times), Honduras (seven times), the Dominican Republic (four times), Guatemala, Panama (six times), Costa Rica, Mexico (three times), and Haiti (twice) between 1903 and 1934. The United States helped to put down revolts, replaced governments when necessary, and offered battleships-in-the-harbor “advice” to others. But the only territory it annexed in that period was the U.S. Virgin Islands, peacefully purchased from Denmark in 1917.

  In his letter to The Harvard Crimson,33 Albizu expressed the hope that Puerto Rico might gain independence and become like Cuba.

  *

  Albizu’s hope hinged, above all, on one figure, Woodrow Wilson, elected president in 1912. A Southern Democrat, Wilson was a far cry from the three Republican imperialists who had preceded him: William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft.

  The contrast was clearest with Roosevelt. As a boy, Teddy Roosevelt had cheered for the Union soldiers as they passed through New York on their way to subdue the seceding South—and he grew up to be the single most bellicose and imperialistic president in U.S. history. By contrast, Wilson’s earliest memories were of the soon-to-be-defeated Confederate Army, whose wounded and dying members came as patients to his father’s church, which served as a Confederate hospital. As an adult, Wilson shared none of Roosevelt’s lust for violent conquest. For his secretary of state he chose William Jennings Bryan, the great anti-imperialist.

  Upon Wilson’s election, some twenty thousand Filipinos gathered in Manila to celebrate—the paper called him “a modern Moses.”34 They had reason for optimism. The 1912 Democratic Party platform condemned imperialism as “an inexcusable blunder,35 which has involved us in enormous expense, brought us weakness instead of strength, and laid our nation open to the charge of abandonment of the fundamental doctrine of self-government.” Wilson himself talked of his desire to see the Philippines let go. Speaking more generally, he told Congress that the colonies were “no longer to be selfishly exploited” and that “the familiar rights and privileges” of citizens should be extended to territorial inhabitants.36

  This was not empty speech.37 In the Philippines, he ended military rule and replaced many mainland officials with Filipinos. In 1916 he hesitantly agreed to support a bill to set the colony free in four years. It passed in the Senate by a single vote but died in the House. In its place, Congress passed a weaker and vaguer bill, promising the Philippines liberty whenever it achieved that all-important but conspicuously undefined condition of “stable government.”

  In 1917, under the pressures of incipient war, Wilson backed another important bill, this one concerning Puerto Rico. It made Puerto Ricans citizens and allowed them to elect legislators (though the Washington-appointed governor could still veto all legislation). This wasn’t independence, but it was, Albizu noted with satisfaction, “a form of home rule.”38 The bill passed.

  Speaking for Puerto Rico, Albizu wrot
e, “There is faith in the United States and in the spirit of fairness prevailing here.”

  *

  That Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner, would seek to roll back empires made sense. His sympathy for the colonized was no doubt fueled by his anger at how the North had treated what Wilson called its “conquered possessions”—the former Confederate states—after the Civil War.39

  But there was another, darker side to Wilson’s Southern identity. He was not just a son of the South in general, but the son of a Southern pastor who had defended slavery by writing a pamphlet titled Mutual Relation of Masters and Slaves as Taught in the Bible. It was a worldview that Wilson never entirely shook off. As president of Princeton, he stood against admitting black students. As president of the United States, he looked on with approval as his cabinet members segregated large parts of the federal government.

  Wilson didn’t think of nonwhites as subhuman, as some around him did. But he regarded many of them as “children,”40 requiring “training” before they could rule themselves. The nightmare scenario, in his mind, was that the children might gain power they weren’t ready to wield. He thought of the former slaves who had risen to political office immediately after the Civil War. It was a time, Wilson wrote, when the “white men of the South” lay “under the negroes’ heels.”41 This was a catastrophe, a “veritable overthrow of civilization.” As he saw it, the brief participation of African Americans in politics had left a wound “incomparably deeper, incomparably more difficult to undo” than the war itself had.