How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  *

  Where was Cornelius Rhoads in all this? Right in the middle. As chief of the medical division, he was the highest-ranking doctor involved, charged with approving tests on human subjects. Decisions about safety and, ultimately, ethics were his to make. Yet in my review of the records of the Chemical Warfare Service, I found no evidence of his hesitation regarding any test. Rather, it seems that he participated enthusiastically. He established medical testing stations,73 including on San José Island. He arranged to transport men to be gassed.74 He recommended which gases to use and how to use them.75 He offered comments on the tests,76 including one of how people of different skin colors responded to chemical burns.

  At the war’s end, Rhoads won a Legion of Merit award for “combating poison gas and other advances in chemical warfare.”77

  For Rhoads, this was just the beginning. Scientists had known from the start of the war that mustard agents—the main chemicals with which Rhoads was working—targeted lymphoid tissue and bone marrow. Perhaps they could be used to treat lymphoma? Wartime findings were suggestive,78 but other research had priority.

  Scientists planned to return to the issue once the fighting was done, using what they had learned during the war. The military had leftover chemical agents available for research, and Rhoads chaired the committee that decided what to do with them. He divided the stock among three hospitals,79 one of them his own.

  Rhoads also recruited nearly the whole program staff of the Chemical Warfare Service to work for him researching those mustard agents,80 this time for drug development. He did this at a new center that was started with a $4 million grant from Alfred P. Sloan, the president of General Motors. As the director of both Manhattan’s Memorial Hospital and the Sloan Kettering Institute (as it was called) next door, Rhoads was perfectly positioned. He had a massive lab. He had money. And he had a hospital full of terminally ill patients who would eagerly consent to experimental treatments.

  Rhoads launched what he called a “frontal attack with all our forces” on cancer,81 trying chemical after chemical. Given Rhoads’s great force of will, his considerable resources, and his intolerance for alternative approaches,82 his research agenda dominated the scene. The journal Science heralded him as “one of the most prominent American medical researchers” of his day.83 He made the cover of Time in 1949.

  Today, Cornelius Rhoads lives in Puerto Rican memory as a villain. On the mainland, however, he’s been remembered differently: as a pioneer of chemotherapy.

  Indeed, more than remembered, he has been honored. Starting in 1980, with money from an anonymous donor, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) gave the prestigious Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award annually to the young investigator who showed the most promise in cancer research. Rhoads recipients have gone on to be field leaders; one was a Nobel laureate. But so complete was the informational segregation between Puerto Rico and the mainland that the prize was given for twenty-three years before anyone objected. When a biologist from the University of Puerto Rico lodged a complaint, the AACR was taken aback. “It was just totally shocking to us to receive this barrage of communications from people in Puerto Rico out of the blue,”84 said the CEO. Even the donor who’d funded the award hadn’t known of Rhoads’s Puerto Rican legacy.

  And that’s how you hide an empire.

  10

  FORTRESS AMERICA

  For the inhabitants of U.S. territories, empire was an inescapable daily presence.1 They saluted the U.S. flag. They studied the English language and U.S. history in school. Their money had George Washington’s face on it. They observed U.S. holidays—Lincoln’s Birthday, the Fourth of July—as well as the anniversary of the U.S. occupation (an occasion that Puerto Rican nationalists celebrated in 1938 by trying to shoot the governor).

  Yet on the mainland, empire slipped easily from view. Consider the coverage in The New York Times in a representative year, 1930.2 Its readers were nearly twice as likely to encounter articles about Poland or Brazil as they were about the Philippines. The 13 articles the paper ran about Albania (plot against king zog foiled, etc.) far outstripped the 6 it printed about Alaska. Hawai‘i appeared seven times that year, Guam not once. In contrast, the Times ran 639 articles about India, Britain’s largest colony. That was nearly three times as many as it ran about all U.S. territories combined, territories in which more than 10 percent of the U.S. population lived.

  It wasn’t much different in the realm of books. Scanning the library shelves, it’s easy to find high-profile books from the interwar period depicting Native Americans and the western frontier (Little House on the Prairie is one), but prominent treatments of overseas territories are rare. The only one with a truly large audience was Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) by the anthropologist Margaret Mead, a wildly popular ethnography that featured frank discussions of Samoan sexuality and launched Mead’s career as one of the most famous scholars in the country. Yet Mead wrote of “Samoa,” not “American Samoa” (the colony’s legal name), and avoided mention of colonies, territories, and empires altogether. It is entirely possible to read Coming of Age without realizing that the “brown Polynesian people” she describes encountering on “a South Sea island” are U.S. nationals.3

  The indifference toward the colonies in the culture was met with an equal indifference in the government. Whereas Britain governed its possessions from large, prominent, and imposing edifices, the United States had no colonial building in its capital. Nor did it have a school to train colonial officials. Its territories were ruled by a haphazard and improvised set of bureaucratic arrangements under the army, navy, and Department of the Interior.

  It showed. The men sent to run the territories, unlike the trained administrators who oversaw European colonies, simply didn’t know much about the places to which they’d been assigned, and they cycled rapidly through their posts. Between Guam’s annexation in 1899 and World War II, it had nearly forty governors. FDR’s first governor of Puerto Rico, who served for six months, spoke no Spanish and left reporters with the distinct impression that he didn’t know where the island was.4 There was a period of several months when the territory of Alaska, which is half the physical size of India, didn’t have a single federal official in it.5

  Colonial subjects complained, of course, but few mainlanders listened. As one Filipino Harvard graduate noted in 1926, “It has been impossible to induce the American people to take more than a passing interest in the conduct of Philippine affairs.”6

  Even the people who should have been interested weren’t. The Anti-Imperialist League,7 which in 1899 had claimed more than half a million contributors, atrophied badly after the 1900 election. In 1924, progressives associated with The Nation magazine revived the league, but in its new incarnation it had a different focus. Ernest Gruening, who had been The Nation’s managing editor, suggested giving the organization a new name, the Pan-American Freedom League.8 That suggestion accurately captured the organization’s interests: not advocating on behalf of the formal territories (only some of which were in the Americas), but resisting U.S. interference with the sovereign states of the Americas. It was an organization, in other words, concerned not with Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, or the Philippines, but with Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico.

  Mainland inattentiveness had always been a strain on the territories, but by the 1930s it became an outright danger. That was a decade of economic desperation and military peril, when “Fortress America” built protective barriers against a hostile world. Yet the colonies received little protection. Instead, they watched from the outside as the walls around the mainland grew tall.

  *

  The blurry haze that enshrouded colonial policy was a constant source of complaint. To firm things up, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established a central office in 1934: the Division of Territories and Island Possessions within the Interior Department. For the first time, Puerto Rico, Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the U.S. Virgin Islands were under a single authority, and within five years it would cover
the Philippines and the major guano islands, too. The only inhabited territories remaining separate were Guam and American Samoa, kept as fiefdoms of the navy.

  To head the new office, Roosevelt tapped Ernest Gruening of the revived Anti-Imperialist League. Gruening’s colleagues at The Nation were ecstatic. “Not in all the years that I have been writing for the press can I recall an appointment which has given me more satisfaction,”9 the magazine’s editor wrote. “His whole career would seem to have led right up to this post.”

  Gruening had enjoyed quite a career.10 Though trained in medicine at Harvard (no overlap with Albizu or Rhoads, unfortunately), he had made his living in journalism and politics. As a (white) member of the Boston branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he’d led the campaign to prevent The Birth of a Nation from opening in that city. He was also a founding member of the American Birth Control League, the organization that would become Planned Parenthood. He had edited a Spanish-language daily in New York, supervised The Nation’s critical coverage of the Haitian occupation, and written an important book about the Mexican Revolution.

  Few outsiders had mastered Caribbean affairs as thoroughly as Ernest Gruening had. Yet, typical for his generation of anti-imperialists, Gruening knew little of the United States’ actual colonies. “Imperialism” was for him a more diffuse notion, one that referred not to formal territorial conquest, but to the informal bullying of weaker states, particularly those in Latin America. In fact, for all his travels, Gruening had spent only a single day in a U.S. colony—a brief stopover in Puerto Rico.11

  And now he was in charge of the whole empire.

  Gruening sought guidance from the president. Roosevelt rattled off his assessments of the territories.12 Hawai‘i was in “pretty good shape.” The Virgin Islands needed work. Alaska should be used as a settlement outlet for Dust Bowl refugees—The Grapes of Wrath on Ice. “As for Puerto Rico,” he continued, “that place is hopeless, hopeless.”

  “This new division is really the equivalent of the British colonial office, isn’t it, Mr. President?” Gruening asked.

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Well,” Gruening hesitantly probed, “a democracy shouldn’t have any colonies.”

  Roosevelt smiled. He held his arms out, palms up. “I think you’re right. Let’s see what you can develop.”

  *

  Let’s see what you can develop? This was hardly the faith of the fathers. It was even a new tack for Roosevelt. Early in his career, he had followed in the footsteps of his distant cousin Teddy, serving as assistant secretary of the navy and fantasizing about annexing the Caribbean.13

  Yet the 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 1932.14

  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.15

  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.16

  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. Since colonial sugar competed with mainland cane and beet sugar, mainland farmers demanded protection from it. Ernest Gruening objected to the farmers’ lobbying. Discriminating against colonial sugar, he testified to Congress, would perpetuate the notion that there were “two kinds of territory” in the country,17 “a continental and offshore America.” But Congress enacted sugar production quotas anyway. The territorial quotas were restrictive; those for continental cane and beet sugar were obliging. Through these and other legal mechanisms, the mainland secured economic relief while the colonies paid the cost.18

  Beet growers in Colorado weren’t the only ones worried about the colonies. West Coast labor unions nervously eyed the tens of thousands of Filipinos who competed with whites for agricultural jobs—since Filipinos were U.S. nationals, no law stopped them from moving to the mainland. Then there was the military situation to consider. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and seemed poised to advance on Southeast Asia in pursuit of colonies. The Philippines and Guam stood right in its path. Would the United States really go to war over these faraway, barely known, and not-very-profitable possessions?

  Maybe it wouldn’t have to. Two years into the Depression, Calvin Coolidge noted a “reversal of opinion” about Philippine independence.19 A number of politicians, FDR included, were coming around on the issue. Rather than absorbing the Philippines’ trade and migrants and defending it against Japan, the new thinking went, why not just get rid of it?

  The 1930s are known as a decade of protectionism, when the United States put up hefty tariffs to barricade itself against the world. Now it seemed that this spirit was going to change the very borders of the country. The Philippines was going to be dumped over the castle walls.

  *

  The sentiment behind the campaign in Washington for Philippine independence was hardly noble. “It would be a mortifying spectacle to see the United States readjust its Philippine policy to fit the balance sheets of a select group of industrial and agricultural interests,”20 chided The Christian Science Monitor. A comprehensive survey in 1931–32 of nearly three hundred major mainland newspapers found 92 percent against it,21 including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Daily Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

  Still, for Filipinos, it was an opportunity, and even more so after Roosevelt’s 1932 election brought the first Democrat to the White House since Woodrow Wilson. The fortunate alignment of Democrats and depression would “surely never happen again within any reasonable human foresight,”22 noted the president of the University of the Philippines.

  There was a third necessary element, though: Manuel Quezon, the president of the Philippine Senate and the indispensable power broker in the colony. Quezon was a master politician,23 adept at playing all sides at once. He had served on Aguinaldo’s staff (at age twenty) during the war, but after Aguinaldo’s surrender, he’d spied f
or the colonial government and helped bring the holdouts to heel. He led the Nationalist Party, but he was also one of the Baguio Country Club’s six Filipino founding members.

  Cameron Forbes likened Quezon to a “wonderfully trained hunting dog run wild.” Handled correctly,24 he would bring in the sheep. “But alone or in bad company, he goes wrong and ends up killing lambs and devastating hen yards.”

  A fairer way to put it would be to say that Manuel Quezon embodied the contradictions of colonialism. The desire for the colonizer’s approval, the demand for autonomy, conciliation, violence—Quezon contained multitudes. One journalist compared talking with him to trying to pick up mercury with a fork.25

  Quezon proved especially fluid when it came to independence. Most Filipinos wanted it badly, Quezon knew, and he won votes by demanding it. “I would rather have a government run like hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans” was his famous slogan. Yet he also saw, better than anyone, the dangers involved. The mainland may not have depended on the Philippines, but after decades of U.S. rule, the Philippines depended on the mainland very much. By the 1930s, about four-fifths of its trade was going there.26 And although the colonial government had built a small native army to quash local rebellions, the Philippines had been prevented from developing an outward-facing military able to repel a foreign invader. A sudden, simultaneous loss of U.S. military protection and tariff-free access to mainland markets spelled catastrophe.

  In the past, Quezon had squared the circle by publicly demanding independence while privately assuring his contacts in the federal government that this was just empty talk.27 As long as Washington remained resolute in hanging on to its colony, that strategy worked. But now, in the 1930s, Quezon found himself leaning against an open door. A bill granting the Philippines independence in eight years sailed through the House in forty minutes, with Democrats for it voting unanimously. Panicked, Quezon arranged to have it blocked by the Philippine Legislature. But this was not ultimately a tenable position for the head of the Nationalist Party, so he supported a nearly identical bill that Congress passed the next year. Again acting on Quezon’s direction, the Philippine Legislature ratified this version unanimously on May 1, 1934,28 the thirty-sixth anniversary of the U.S. occupation.