How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  But though it borrowed from the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, the Japanese constitution was far more liberal, the result of a sort of unchecked New Deal that occupation authorities imposed on the country. The new constitution banned war, prohibited racial discrimination, guaranteed academic freedom, forbade torture, and granted all citizens the right to the “minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living.”

  Somehow, in the anything-goes atmosphere of the occupation, a twenty-two-year-old Jewish woman named Beate Sirota had made it onto the constitutional drafting committee (she had spent part of her childhood in Tokyo and was one of the few whites who spoke Japanese fluently).38 It was largely owing to her influence that the constitution mandated equal rights within marriage and prohibited sex discrimination—things that the U.S. constitution conspicuously does not do.

  That is still Japan’s constitution today. In more than sixty years, it hasn’t been amended once.

  *

  The war brought the United States, as Winston Churchill put it, to the “summit of the world.”39 It made more goods, had more oil, held more gold, and possessed more planes than all other countries combined. It was, Truman marveled, “the most powerful nation,40 perhaps, in all history.”

  But what is less often appreciated is how much territory the United States had won, too. In 1940 its colonized population had made up about 13 percent of the Greater United States. Now, adding it all up—the colonies and occupations—yielded a much larger total. The overseas area under U.S. jurisdiction contained some 135 million people.41 That was, remarkably, more than the 132 million who inhabited the mainland.

  In other words, if you looked up at the end of 1945 and saw a U.S. flag overhead, odds are that you weren’t seeing it because you lived in a state. You were more likely colonized or living in occupied territory. Probably somewhere in the Pacific.

  14

  DECOLONIZING THE UNITED STATES

  World War II ended with the Stars and Stripes flying proudly over thousands of overseas bases and tens of millions of people in colonies and occupied lands. It was the familiar forty-eight-star flag that ran up those countless far-flung poles, with one star for every state.

  Yet soon after the war, mainlanders wondered if those forty-eight stars sufficed. The United States is the only country whose flag, by law, must change when the shape of the country does. And so enthusiastic hobbyists bombarded the government with unsolicited proposals for new designs. Forty-nine stars, fifty, fifty-one, more. Some rendered their ideas in crayon or colored pencil. Others went full Betsy Ross and sewed.

  There are many ways to arrange stars on a flag, it turns out. The proposals placed them in grids, in circles, and in shapes (an eagle, a larger star, the letters USA). In one, the stars escaped the confines of the blue square and leaped onto the stripes, like inmates on a jailbreak. The school-children of Beaver Creek, Montana, preferred a familiar stars-in-rows configuration but advised clearing room at the bottom for a forty-ninth star, with “plenty of space remaining” should other states be added.1

  When these amateur vexillologists specified which new states they had in mind, they often pointed to Alaska, Hawai‘i, and Puerto Rico. Ernest Gruening and his wife,2 Dorothy, designed a fifty-star flag, which they flew proudly from the governor’s mansion in Anchorage, in support of Alaska and Hawai‘i.

  Forty-nine-star flag designed by E. H. Clehouse of Terre Haute, Indiana

  But it’s telling that flag designers often left things open. They sensed, correctly, that many futures were possible. There were excited murmurs in Douglas MacArthur’s Japan about statehood,3 and Congress received a petition to make it the forty-ninth state. Mainland papers—including the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Times-Herald, the New York Daily News, The Atlanta Constitution, and the influential African American Amsterdam News—came out for Philippine statehood,4 which the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Military Affairs also supported. (“If the offer is seriously made we are only too willing to consider it,” the Philippine delegation to the UN General Assembly replied.) A congressman from California, meanwhile, proposed adding Iceland,5 then under military control, to the union (“the strategic soundness” of this, noted the New York Journal-American, was “manifest”). And in 1945 the House Committee on Naval Affairs raised the possibility of annexing Japan’s outlying and mandated islands as the “State of the American Pacific.”6

  Talk of new states could be pie-eyed and fanciful, but the possibility that the United States might undergo some form of territorial expansion after the war was completely realistic. In 1940 Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle predicted that the war would make the United States into “an imperial power greater than the world has ever seen.”7 Certainly, with its millions-strong army, it could enforce any territorial arrangement it wished.

  “From the point of view of material resources,8 an imperial career is entirely possible for the United States,” the political scientist Albert Viton wrote. “The question is being asked all over the world: How will America use its overwhelming power?”

  It was a good question, though it takes a little mental contortion to see how good. Today, the idea that the United States might have annexed France or claimed Europe’s Asian colonies in 1945 seems like an absurd counter-factual. But it wasn’t unthinkable. That was, in fact, precisely what Germany and Japan had just done. And it wasn’t too different from what the United States had itself done, repeatedly, to formerly Spanish lands throughout the preceding century.

  Indeed, 1945 bore a striking resemblance to 1898, just on a larger scale. As in 1898, the United States had decisively beaten a lesser empire (or, in this case, two) and had troops stationed in the defeated enemy’s provinces. Why not annex them? And why not, as it had in 1898 with Hawai‘i and American Samoa, take still more territory, beyond the spoils of war? Japan and Germany were wrecked, and it’s doubtful that Britain or the Soviet Union could beat back an aggressively expansive United States. At the war’s end, the United States possessed the world’s fourth-largest empire,9 accounted for more than half the world’s manufacturing production,10 and had atom bombs. Why not conquer the globe?

  But of course, that’s not what happened. Not even close. Instead, the United States and its allies did something highly unusual: they won a war and gave up territory. The United States led the charge, setting free its largest colony (the Philippines), folding up its occupations, nudging its European counterparts to abandon their empires, and demobilizing its army. It didn’t annex any land in the war’s aftermath; the closest it came was taking control of the islands of Micronesia in 1947, but technically they remained under the United Nations as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (in 1986 a subset, the Northern Marianas, became a U.S. territory).

  In late 1945, counting the occupations, 51 percent of the population of the Greater United States lived outside the states. But by 1960, after Hawai‘i and Alaska entered the union, that number had fallen to around 2 percent, which is roughly where it has been ever since. Today, all U.S. overseas territory, including base sites, comprises an area smaller than Connecticut.11

  How did this happen?

  *

  There are two answers to that question, both having to do with how empire changed as a result of the Second World War. First, that war fueled a global anti-imperial resistance movement that put up major impediments to colonial empire. Second, it introduced other ways of projecting power across the planet, ways that didn’t depend on large colonies.

  Both changes were essential. But focus for the moment on the first, which was more conspicuous. World War II spurred a worldwide rebellion against empire. The revolt started in Asia but spread quickly to Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. In a shockingly short period of time, colonized peoples dismantled the world’s great empires.

  In 1940 nearly one out of every three individuals on the planet was colonized.12 By 1965, it was down to one in fifty.

  It wasn’t hard to
see this coming. As Douglas MacArthur stood on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, where he accepted Japan’s surrender on September 2, 1945, he could smell liberation in the air. The surrender meant not only the defeat of Japan’s home islands but also the fall of its empire, a great arc of territory that covered nearly all Southeast Asia, plus Korea, Manchuria, a large hunk of northern China, and thousands of Pacific islands. “Today, freedom is on the offensive,”13 MacArthur said. “Unshackled peoples” were finally “tasting the full sweetness of liberty.”

  That wasn’t the half of it. Asians weren’t just free from Japan, they were increasingly envisioning themselves as free from all foreign rule. On August 15 the nationalist leader Sukarno declared Indonesia’s independence. On September 2, the same day MacArthur was giving his speech, Ho Chi Minh did the same for Vietnam. Four days later, the People’s Republic of Korea announced the formation of its independent government.

  This was what the Second World War had done. Colonized peoples had seen their white overlords defeated by an Asian power—it was the sort of sight that was hard to unsee. They’d heard Japan’s message of “Asia for the Asiatics” blaring from radio speakers for years. In Burma and the Philippines, they’d tasted liberty itself when Japan granted those colonies nominal independence in 1943.

  Watching from afar, the Harlem poet Langston Hughes offered a prediction. Europe and the United States would take their former possessions back, he wrote. “But when they do,14 those great cities of the East will never be the same again. The brownskin natives will look at those tall European-style buildings and say, ‘Colored people lived there once!’ And in their minds they will think, ‘We have a right to live there again.’”

  Hughes might have gone further. It wasn’t just what Asians thought, it was what they could do. The tight arms controls that had been a persistent feature of colonial life broke down entirely as the war spread weapons all around Asia. “The bearing of arms was thrilling,”15 remembered Luis Taruc, the leader of the Philippines’ largest guerrilla army, the Hukbalahap. Before the war, his men had encountered guns only in the hands of the police, who menaced their picket lines and quashed their insurrections. “Now, standing in an armed group, running their hands down rifle barrels they felt more powerful than any picket line,” Taruc wrote.

  So they formed armies, armies beyond the control of any outside power. There was Mao Zedong’s Red Army in China, the Burma National Army, the Indian National Army, the Viet Minh, the Lao Issara (Free Laos), the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, and the Hukbalahap in the Philippines. Some had grown under Japan’s protection, others were born of the anti-Japanese resistance, still others were hastily assembled in the heady days after the war. “From one end of the vast continent to the other,”16 wrote a journalist in Asia, “it has seldom been possible since Japan’s collapse to escape the sound of continuing gunfire.”

  It was the Asian Spring. The whole continent had become, in the words of one of MacArthur’s generals, “an enormous pot,17 seething and boiling.”

  *

  The prospect of Asia boiling over wasn’t a happy one for Washington. Yes, the end of the Japanese Empire was a fine thing. But the United States still had business in the region. What of the raw materials, such as the rich Southeast Asian rubber plantations, that Japan had started a global war to seize? Was President Truman really content to see those fall to the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army? Or to Ho Chi Minh?

  Even in the Philippines, where MacArthur had been allied with the guerrilla armies, there was cause for concern. In the areas the guerrillas controlled, they’d begun a social revolution by dispossessing landlords and redistributing property. In September 1945, more than twenty thousand peasants,18 organized into the Filipino Democratic Alliance, marched on Manila, demanding immediate independence and the imprisonment or execution of collaborators. Many of those collaborating politicians were part of the Philippine government MacArthur was hastily rebuilding.

  After the First World War, the United States had returned virtually its whole army to civilian status within a year. But in the face of the postwar tumult, the Truman administration worried about relinquishing the army. “We are now concerned with the peace of the entire world,”19 explained George Marshall, the army chief of staff. “And the peace can only be maintained by the strong.”

  In August 1945 the War Department announced that it would need 2.5 million men for the coming year.20 Planes and ships could be used to command the seas and the air. But to run occupations and put down rebellions? You needed an army for that.

  The problem was, the army had to agree. Marshall’s plan to keep men overseas provoked a furious reaction. Families of servicemen blasted their representatives with letters and buried congressional offices in baby shoes, all bearing tags reading bring daddy home. On a single day in December,21 Truman’s office estimated that it had received sixty thousand postcards demanding the troops’ return.

  Politicians, fearing electoral consequences, pulled strings. As they did, the army emptied out. “At the rate we are demobilizing troops,”22 warned Truman, “in a very short time we will have no means with which to enforce our demands.” Worried about the “disintegration of our armed forces” being carried out at “dangerous speed,”23 Truman ordered a slowdown in January 1946. Troops would stay overseas, even if there were ships ready to take them back.

  This was, for many, the last straw. Days after Truman’s announcement, twenty thousand GIs marched in Manila and gathered at the ruins of the Legislative Building. They wanted to go home, of course—that was the main thing, and for some the only thing. Yet others, including the leaders, had seen the Asian Spring firsthand and objected strenuously to being kept around to suppress it. “Let us leave the Chinese and Filipinos to take care of their own internal affairs,”24 one speaker urged. “The Filipinos are our allies. We ain’t gonna fight them!” cried another. The demonstrators read a letter of support from the Filipino Democratic Alliance.25 The organizers, meanwhile, passed a resolution declaring solidarity with the Filipino guerrillas.26

  Yankee, go home!: GIs in Manila protesting their own presence overseas

  Lieutenant General W. D. Styler, commanding general of the army forces in the West Pacific, addressed the men by radio. He pointed to the “vast new tasks” that the United States must undertake in Asia.27 But the men didn’t listen. They booed and catcalled,28 drowning out whole paragraphs of Styler’s speech.

  The Manila protest set off a string of others. Twenty thousand soldiers protested in Honolulu, three thousand in Korea, five thousand in Calcutta.29 On Guam,30 the men burned the secretary of war in effigy, and more than three thousand sailors staged a hunger strike. Protests erupted in China, Burma, Japan, France, Germany, Britain, and Austria, too, with supporting demonstrations in Washington, Chicago, and New York.

  “What kind of government is this?” asked one of the soldiers.31 “What are we that scream piously, ‘the world must be free,’ then keep it to ourselves?”

  That sentiment animated the most dogged of the protesters. Another GI complained that “in the Oriental surge toward freedom we cling to imperialism.”32 All the members of the 823rd Engineer Aviation Battalion in Burma, an African American unit, sent Truman a letter saying that they were “disgusted with undemocratic American foreign policy.”33 They did not “want to be associated” with the “shooting and bombing to death the freedom urge of the peoples of the Southeast Asiatic countries. We do not want to ‘unify’ China with bayonets and bombing planes.”

  There is a word for it when tens of thousands of uniformed men march in the streets, heckle their commanders, declare solidarity with guerrilla forces, and burn the secretary of war in effigy. It was, as Truman privately put it, “plain mutiny.”34 And under the Articles of War,35 any officer or soldier who mutinied or even witnessed a mutiny without using “his utmost endeavor” to stop it could be punished by death.

  “You men forget you’re not working for General Motors
,”36 the troops’ commander in Manila huffed. “You’re still in the Army.”

  But was the army really going to court-martial tens of thousands of its men? Was it actually going to execute anyone? The uprising had grown so large that this was hard to imagine.

  Instead, army leaders meted out minor punishments to nine ringleaders. They accepted MacArthur’s charitable judgment that the men were merely suffering from “acute homesickness” and were “not inherently challenging discipline or authority.”37 Boys, that is, will be boys.

  Yet even as leaders sought to brush the uprising under the rug, they capitulated to its demands. The men went home, shrinking the army from more than 8 million troops in May 1945 to fewer than 1 million by the end of June 1947—far short of the 2.5 million men the War Department had called for. The army had become, as one official wrote, “a clock running down,38 losing time, a mechanism without power.”

  Enough men stayed abroad to occupy Japan and parts of Germany and Austria. But the Korean occupation, which Roosevelt had predicted would last forty years, lasted only three. Truman lamented that “our influence throughout the world,39 as well as China, waned as the millions of American soldiers were processed through the discharge centers.”

  That was an exaggeration. The United States still had more ships, planes, and bases than anyone else. But its peacetime army was only the sixth largest in the world.40 It was in no position to colonize the planet.

  Could the United States even hold on to the colonies it still had? The big question was the Philippines. In 1934, Congress, eager to relieve itself of the economic and military burdens of empire, had provisionally slated the colony for independence. But independence was firmly predicated on the commonwealth government protecting life and property and assuming the bonded debt held by the colonial government. If it did those things, it would gain its liberty on the Fourth of July, 1946.