Young Puerto Ricans didn’t actually commit many crimes in the postwar period. The evidence suggests that they misbehaved less than other New Yorkers.99 But as Puerto Ricans poured in from the island, the tabloid press trumpeted sensational tales of their malfeasance. Journalists who had had conspicuously little to say about the anticolonial uprising of 1950 were only too happy to sound off about Puerto Rican gangs, dope fiends, and switchblade artists.
The inflammatory reportage quickly made its way into the culture at large. Wenzell Brown, who by the 1950s had become a major pulp fiction writer, introduced his readers to the Puerto Rican underworld with such lurid novels as Monkey on My Back, The Big Rumble, and Run, Chico, Run. Puerto Rican teens featured in the films The Young Savages and Blackboard Jungle. The mute youth accused of murder in 12 Angry Men appeared Puerto Rican. And of course, a Puerto Rican gang—the Sharks—was at the center of one of the most successful musicals ever staged: West Side Story.100
That musical, written by Arthur Laurents with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, premiered in 1957, three years after the House shooting. It was first conceived as a Romeo-and-Juliet story about a Jewish woman and a Catholic man (flying initially under the unappetizing title Gang Bang). But the creative team, seeking relevance, swapped out the Jews for Puerto Ricans.
Sondheim was nervous. “I can’t do this show,”101 he protested at first. “I’ve never even known a Puerto Rican.”
His lyrics bore that out. In one draft, the characters fantasize, like the farmers and cowmen of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, about statehood. “When we’re a state in America,102 then we migrate to America!” they sing excitedly in broken English. Of course, Puerto Ricans were already citizens with the right to move anywhere in the country they chose. And, the commonwealth constitution having just passed, statehood was a dim prospect.
Sondheim cut those verses but left in a portrait of island life, offered in the song “America,” that managed to capture nearly every stereotype about Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico was, in the song, an “ugly island” of “tropic diseases,” with “hurricanes blowing” and its “population growing.”
Before West Side Story premiered, the editors of La Prensa,103 a Puerto Rican paper in New York, called the show’s producers to object to the portrayal of Puerto Rico as disease-ridden. They threatened to picket if the song wasn’t altered. Sondheim conceded, later, that their complaint was justified. But he changed nothing.
“I wasn’t about to sacrifice a line that sets the tone for the whole lyric,” he sniffed.
West Side Story was phenomenally popular; it’s had some forty thousand productions since 1957.104 In 1961 the producers turned it into an equally popular film (with the controversial verse modified), which won ten Academy Awards, including for best picture. It quickly became, as it remains today, the first point of reference for mainlanders thinking about Puerto Rico. And yet, however sympathetically it portrayed young Puerto Ricans in New York, it offered little hint of the island’s place within the U.S. Empire or of the political tumult of the 1950s. Whatever ailed the Sharks, it wasn’t colonialism.
Oddly, this wasn’t the only time Stephen Sondheim would dodge Puerto Rican politics. His 1990 musical, Assassins, told the story of nine assassins or would-be assassins of U.S. presidents, from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. But it didn’t include Oscar Collazo or Griselio Torresola. Because their motives were political, Sondheim explained, they were “less complex psychologically” than the other assassins.105 And so Sondheim ended up writing one Broadway musical about New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties and another about presidential assassins—without ever mentioning the New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties who tried to assassinate the president.
Still, he got one thing right. As Sondheim put it, indelibly, in West Side Story: “Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America.”
16
SYNTHETICA
By 1960, the U.S. Empire had visibly diminished. The Philippines was independent, Hawai‘i and Alaska were states, and Puerto Rico had the nebulous status of “commonwealth.” The remaining colonies were small: Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa—total population 123,151—plus another 70,724 living in the United Nations’ “strategic trust territory” in Micronesia under U.S. supervision.
Yet the United States is a restless country, and it didn’t take long for new prospects to present themselves. In 1962 President John F. Kennedy called for a mission to the moon. It was, he said, a “new frontier.”1
Talk of frontiers was a throwback to the nineteenth century, but it made a certain sense. The prospect of claiming the moon—huge, uninhabited, strategically useful, and rich in minerals—is precisely the sort of thing that would have made the world conquerors of old salivate. “I would annex the planets if I could,”2 the British arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes once mused. “I often think of that.”
Lunar colonization was a distant dream in Rhodes’s day and even seems far-fetched now, but at the time, it appeared graspable. One has to keep in mind the wrenching technological innovations that the leaders of the United States had already witnessed in their lifetime. Dwight Eisenhower was born into a world containing only a countable handful of cars, a world where lightbulbs were still a novelty. Yet he lived to see computers, nuclear bombs, supersonic jets, and manned spacecraft. Who was to say that the science-fiction tales of settling distant planets were fantasies? A few years after the moon landing, NASA convened a study group on space colonization, which judged it to be both “technically feasible” and “desirable.”3
And yet the United States didn’t annex the moon. It didn’t even try. Instead, it went to extraordinary lengths to assure the world that the Apollo program was not about expansion or empire. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Outer Space Treaty in 1967, agreeing that no nation could claim sovereignty in space. Then, once it seemed likely that the Apollo missions would succeed, NASA appointed a Committee on Symbolic Activities for the First Lunar Landing and tasked it with ensuring that no one would confuse the moon landing for a landgrab.4 The committee seriously considered planting the United Nations flag instead of the U.S. one, or perhaps small flags for every country.
In the end, Congress insisted on the U.S. flag. But it issued a declaration explaining that this was simply “a symbolic gesture of national pride” and “not to be construed as a declaration of national appropriation.”5
The plaque the astronauts left captured that internationalist spirit.6 “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969, a.d.” read the text, under pictures of the hemispheres of the globe. “We came in peace for all mankind.”
*
What had happened? How could a country that had once launched wars for foreign lands be so blasé about the largest clump of territory ever to become available? Where had its imperialist spirit gone?
Part of the answer, of course, is the fierce resistance put up by the colonized peoples of the world. They had turned empire into an exhausting and occasionally bloody affair. Whereas colonizers in the nineteenth century had annexed territory with pride, by the 1960s they understood that forthright imperialism risked infuriating the increasingly powerful Third World. By then, even taking the uninhabited moon seemed as if it might kick up trouble.
But the exhaustion of colonialism can’t be explained solely by the new balance of forces.7 Yes, opponents of empire grew stronger after World War II, but so did would-be imperialists. The United States ended that war with a formidable air force, atomic weaponry, and a globe-spanning network of military bases. Its defeat of Japan showed what this firepower could do. Had it truly wished, the United States could have visited the same fate upon its Cold War adversaries in Vietnam and Korea. But it didn’t, nor did it even try to annex those countries. The newfound power of the Third World peoples cannot alone account for that.
It may help to look at the decline of colonialism from a different angle, focusing not just on supply but
on demand as well. The worldwide anti-imperialist revolt drove the cost of colonies up. Yet at the same time, new technologies gave powerful countries ways to enjoy the benefits of empire without claiming populated territories.8 In doing so, they drove the demand for colonies down.
The “empire-killing technologies” ranged from skywave radio to screw threads, and they worked in different ways. But, collectively, they weaned the United States off colonies. In so doing, they also helped to create the world we know today, where powerful countries project their influence through globalization rather than colonization.
*
In the nineteenth century, there were many reasons why major powers took colonies. Ideologies of “civilization,” the international competition for prestige, dark psychosexual urges—these were all present in the tangled business of empire. But by the mid-twentieth century, talk of uplifting savages or carrying Christ to heathen lands had subsided, and starker motives shone through more clearly. Colonies were useful for their produce, and they were useful strategically.
Often, those two motives blended together. Complex industrial societies depended on goods that they couldn’t mine or grow at home. But it wasn’t just that they needed those goods, they needed secure access to them, the kind that couldn’t be denied even if war broke out. And if they couldn’t get it? Germany had crashed headfirst into that problem during World War I, when its enemies locked it out of South American markets. South America was where the all-important nitrates came from, used to make fertilizer and explosives. Germany found itself in the extremely uncomfortable position of fighting a two-front war without access to either Peru’s guano or Chile’s sodium nitrates. It was only Fritz Haber’s timely invention of ammonia synthesis that kept Germany fighting for four years.
Haber had solved the nitrate problem, but there were many other raw materials that advanced economies required, including petroleum, iron, coal, indigo, tin, copper, sisal, cotton, kapok, silk, quinine, tungsten, bauxite, and palm oil. The United States, with its massive mainland stretching across multiple climatic zones, was blessed with an abundant crop of internal raw materials. But it, too, was dependent. It relied most visibly on rubber, which grew only five to ten degrees from the equator, and which it got mainly by dint of its friendly relations with European empires.
Rubber was a colonial product par excellence. In the late nineteenth century, King Leopold II of Belgium had claimed a vast colony in the Congo and established a brutal regime bent on rubber extraction, one that brought the population down by some ten million.9 The French, British, and Dutch, for their parts, had set up rubber plantations in their Southeast Asian colonies.
These were profitable ventures, especially as rubber insinuated itself into every nook and cranny of the industrial economy. Tires, tubes, hoses, insulation for electrical wires, raincoats, life rafts, gas masks, and a thousand little parts and bits were made from it. Between 1860 and 1920, world rubber consumption grew nearly two-hundred-fold.10
In the auto-mad United States, rubber thirst was unslakable. By the eve of the Second World War, the country consumed some 70 percent of the world’s supply,11 bought mostly from Europe’s Asian colonies. If war came, the United States would need still more. A Sherman tank used half a ton of rubber,12 a heavy bomber used a full ton, and a battleship used more than twenty thousand rubber parts, totaling eighty tons. As the president of the tire manufacturer B. F. Goodrich warned, without rubber the United States “could offer only 1860 defenses against 1942 attacks.”13
Without rubber—it wasn’t a hypothetical scenario. On December 7/8, 1941, Japan, worried about its own access to rubber and other critical raw materials, expanded its war beyond China and moved on to the resource-rich lands of Southeast Asia. Within months, it conquered the European colonies that accounted for 97 percent of the U.S. rubber supply.14 The United States and its allies were virtually cut off.
It is hard to convey how dire a threat this was. “If a survey were made to determine the most frequently asked question in America today,15 it would probably turn out to be: ‘When are we going to get rubber—and how much?’” wrote the secretary of the interior in mid-1942. “We must get rubber—lots of it—and get it rather quickly, or our whole manner of living will be sadly awry.”
A high-profile governmental report found the situation “so dangerous that unless corrective measures are taken immediately this country will face both a military and civilian collapse.”16 A military and civilian collapse? Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed, adding that in the short time since the report had been issued, “the situation has become more acute.”17
The government scrambled to plug the gap. FDR begged citizens to turn over to the government “every bit of rubber you can possibly spare”: old tires,18 raincoats, garden hoses, shoes, bathing caps, gloves. The president’s Scottish Terrier, Fala, donated his rubber bones. Eventually nearly seven pounds of scrap rubber were collected for every man,19 woman, and child in the country.
It wasn’t nearly enough. The government pressed engineers to explore substitutes. Could cars roll on wooden wheels? Steel wheels? No,20 they couldn’t.
Foreign markets might yield some rubber, and the State Department negotiated agreements with some twenty countries, mostly in Latin America. Yet the wild rubber secured from these was scant, and newly planted rubber trees would take at least six years to start producing.
Could rubber be extracted from some other plant? Thousands of scientists and technicians were hastily recruited to try—it was like the Manhattan Project for botany—but without success.21
To conserve what little rubber remained, the government forbade its use in many forms of manufacturing. A national speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour was imposed to reduce the wear on the mainland’s tires. In June 1942 Roosevelt warned that confiscating civilian tires was a real possibility, perhaps an inevitability. A high-ranking official confided to a journalist that soon there might not be enough rubber for baby bottles.22 Another proposed reducing the length of condoms by half.23 It took his colleagues a moment to realize he was joking.
There was another way out, a Fritz Haber–style solution. Perhaps the United States could find a way to manufacture rubber, to synthesize it from oil or grain alcohol. Yet this, too, seemed unpromising. On the eve of the war, an economist for the Council on Foreign Relations judged that replacing critical raw materials—rubber and others—with synthetic substitutes was simply “not in sight.”24
Synthetic rubber was possible in theory, but it was more of a laboratory curiosity than a viable commodity. No U.S. author had ever published a book on rubber synthesis, and the small trickle of man-made rubber that chemists had produced before the war was useful only in highly specialized functions. The idea of conjuring up an entire industry, reliant on as yet unachieved technical breakthroughs, able to supply enough usable rubber to equip the United States and its allies in a global war—that remained far-fetched.
As the director the War Production Board’s Civilian Supply Division told the Senate, producing the requisite six hundred thousand tons by 1944 would “require a miracle.”25
*
The United States wasn’t the only country facing a rubber drought. Germany had the same problem. As a major industrial power whose colonies had been confiscated after the First World War, Germany depended profoundly on foreign markets for crucial raw materials. It held coal and wood in relative abundance, but when it came to rubber, oil, iron, and many other necessaries, it was, like Japan, a “have-not” nation.
Adolf Hitler was obsessed with this. He’d lived through the First World War, when the British blockade cut Germany off and pushed it to near starvation. Germans had been reduced to using ineffective tires made of metal springs. This must never happen again. “The definitive solution,”26 Hitler believed, lay in “an extension of our living space, that is, an extension of the raw materials and food basis of our nation.” It was this quest for “living space,” Lebensraum, that impelled Hitler to inv
ade neighboring lands and incorporate them into Greater Germany.
War was a dangerous gamble. Yet Hitler had one important weapon in his arsenal: the most advanced chemical industry in the world. Germany’s perpetual dearth of raw materials had spurred its chemists to great heights over the years. It wasn’t an accident that Fritz Haber had been a German. In the late nineteenth century, Germans had devised synthetic dyes to replace natural plants such as indigo. In World War I they had invented synthetic nitrates and poison gases. In the Weimar period they’d come out with rayon, an artificial silk made from wood pulp that alleviated dependence on trade with Asia (Marlene Dietrich proclaimed proudly that she wore only rayon stockings).27 By the time Hitler came to power, the German chemical manufacturer IG Farben was Europe’s largest private corporation.
Hitler saw in IG Farben a way to bridge the resource gap just long enough to allow Germany to claim new territories. Not only could the firm make nitrates from air, it could turn coal into fuel and, Hitler hoped, rubber. The Reich’s Four Year Plan, inaugurated in 1936, plowed a substantial fraction of the economy into IG Farben and its development of synthetics. Hitler ordered that German tires be made exclusively of artificial rubber by 1939. At a rally at Nuremberg that year, he announced triumphantly that Germany had “definitely solved the rubber problem!” Soon after,28 he invaded Poland.
But Hitler had not solved the rubber problem.29 When the war started, Germany’s production and stockpiles sufficed for only two months of fighting.30 Throughout the war, the Wehrmacht was perpetually short of fuel and rubber. Hitler relied on risky blitzkrieg tactics—sudden all-or-nothing attacks—in part because he simply couldn’t confront his enemies in sustained combat. His troops moved largely using horses.31
Desperate for more rubber, the Reich ordered IG Farben to build a new plant in the east, where it would be safe from Allied bombardment. Ultimately, this would be the single largest expenditure in the Four Year Plan. The company chose a promising site in Upper Silesia, a railway hub close to supplies of coal, lime, and water, just outside the town of Auschwitz. To build the plant, the Reich expanded a transit camp, previously used to hold Polish prisoners pending their deportation farther east, into a massive, lethal Arbeitslager.
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