The Panama Canal Zone is a telling example. At the start of the Second World War, the United States had been so nervous about losing access to the canal that it established 134 bases in Panama. But at the end of that war, the military had gotten so comfortable moving around the planet without colonies that Harry Truman relinquished all those bases and proposed turning the canal over to the United Nations. Every president after Truman sought to extricate the United States from the increasingly irrelevant Canal Zone in various ways,64 though it wasn’t until Jimmy Carter’s presidency in the 1970s that a treaty ending U.S. jurisdiction over the zone was finally signed.
It wasn’t the canal that was obsolete—traffic through it continued to grow steadily in the postwar years. It was the Canal Zone, which guaranteed access to the canal and granted control over it. That was the part that no longer seemed essential to national security.
Space-annihilating technologies helped set the terms of the burgeoning Cold War, a war that featured very little annexation by its principals. In 1945 the Allies had divided Germany into zones of occupation, and they did the same to the city of Berlin, lodged within the Soviet zone. Yet in their haste, the occupiers had failed to sign any agreement granting the Western powers access to their zones in Berlin. Since all the ground approaches passed through Soviet-occupied Germany, this meant that Joseph Stalin could entirely blockade the Western sectors of Berlin. Which, in 1948, he did.
It was a bold move. Berlin was importing fifteen thousand tons of goods per day.65 Stalin apparently hoped that by sealing it off, he could force the West to abandon it and perhaps retreat from Germany altogether.
That probably would have worked in the past. Indeed, after the First World War cut Belgium off from its markets, Herbert Hoover, tasked with relieving the Belgians, had been compelled to negotiate the right of free passage from Britain, France, and Germany to get supplies in. If he hadn’t gotten ground access, he wouldn’t have been able to aid Belgium.
Berlin was Belgium without the permission slips. Yet the experience of the Second World War raised a question. Was permission even necessary?
“I may be the craziest man in the world,”66 said the U.S. military governor of occupied Germany, Lucius Clay, to the mayor-elect of Berlin, “but I am going to try the experiment of feeding this city by air.”
General William “Tonnage” Tunner, hero of the Hump, was placed in charge of the operation. It was a fitting hire, “like appointing John Ringling to get the circus on the road,”67 noted the commander of the air force in Europe. Tunner brought his familiar bureaucratic style. “The real excitement from running a successful airlift comes from seeing a dozen lines climbing steadily on a dozen charts,”68 he wrote.
The lines did climb.69 Tunner set the planes in a brisk three-takeoffs-per-minute cadence. Flights were synchronized to the second and kept on an exact path by ground-to-air radio. To celebrate Easter, Tunner tapped the accelerator and landed a plane in Berlin every 61.8 seconds.
The aircraft, departing from bases in western Germany, flew necessities: coal, oil, flour, dehydrated food, and salt. But they also flew grand pianos and, in one case, a power plant. Berlin’s economy ran by air. Stalin, ultimately, could not hold out—the blockade hurt him more than it hurt his adversaries. In the eleventh month, after more than a quarter of a million flights, he lifted the barriers.
The lesson was clear: Stalin had territorial control, but that didn’t mean what it used to.
It was a lesson Moscow would be taught repeatedly. Starting in the late forties, the United States started beaming radio broadcasts into the USSR and its satellites—the communications equivalent of the Berlin Airlift.70 A few high-powered broadcasting stations in Western Europe were all it took to shred the informational sovereignty of the Eastern Bloc. The Voice of America and two CIA-backed operations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation (later renamed Radio Liberty), egged on dissenters, incited uprisings, and aired governmental secrets.
The Soviets tried to jam the broadcasts; by 1958, they were spending more on jamming than on their own transmissions. But they never managed to shut off the stream of information. Multiple times it appears that the Soviets assassinated or tried to assassinate Western journalists. In 1981 the headquarters of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Munich was bombed. Yet not even that stopped the broadcasts.
“When it came to radio waves,71 the iron curtain was helpless,” remembered Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s dissident Solidarity movement. Solidarity had relied heavily on Western radio, which Walesa credited with the collapse of communism in Europe.
“The frontiers could be closed,” he wrote. “Words could not.”
18
THE EMPIRE OF THE RED OCTAGON
The Second World War left the United States in an extraordinary position. It was rich, it was powerful, and, thanks to its chemists and engineers, it had the means to deal with foreign lands without colonizing them. But the war also conferred another advantage, harder to see and operating on a deeper level. It had to do with standards.
Standards—the protocols by which objects and processes are coordinated—are admittedly one of the most stultifying topics known to humankind. A sample of headlines from the journal Industrial Standardization gives a sense of the exquisite heights to which boredom can be taken:
Industry Approves Recommended List of Paper Sizes
New Law Requires Labels for Wool
Brochure Tells About Building Coordination
Revision of List of Recommended Paper Sizes
How Durable Is Rapid-Hardening Concrete?
American Standards for Wood Poles!
National Unification Settles Questions of Number of Flutes for Reamers and Reamer Tolerances
Tolerances for Cylindrical Fits (a four-part series)
Sheet Labels Now Furnish Much Useful Information
Glass Jars of Recommended Sizes Used for Mayonnaise Products
Agriculture Department Defines “Lard”
And I’ll confess a special fondness for this one:
ASA Approval of Pipe Standards Important Event in Pipe History
It’s easy to chuckle. But were it not for agreements on cylindrical fits and reamer tolerances, it’s hard to know how our world could operate. The more we fill our lives with complex manufactured objects and the more those objects move around, the more important it is that they play well with one another.
In 1904 a massive fire ravaged Baltimore.1 Engine companies sped from New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, and Harrisburg to help. Yet there was little they could do, for when they arrived, they found that their hoses couldn’t connect to Baltimore’s hydrants (or, indeed, to one another’s hoses). For thirty helpless hours they watched as 1,562 buildings burned.
Through the early twentieth century, compatibility failures like that were chronic,2 and they made any attempt to move between jurisdictions exasperating. A “bushel” of greens weighed ten pounds in North Carolina, thirty in neighboring Tennessee. The standard berry box in Oregon was illegal in California. Every time truckers crossed state lines, they had to pull over to demonstrate that their vehicles conformed to local standards. And they didn’t always. Height, length, and weight allowances varied wildly from state to state, so that the longest permissible truck in Vermont, a 50-footer, was 24.5 feet too long to enter Kentucky.
College football was a popular sport in the 1920s,3 yet it wasn’t until 1940 that colleges agreed on what a “football” was. Home teams would just supply whatever vaguely football-shaped objects they wanted. Teams that liked to pass used slim balls, teams that emphasized kicking (which early football rules encouraged) proffered short and fat ones.
It wasn’t until 1927 that traffic lights were standardized.4 Before that, drivers in Manhattan stopped on green, started on yellow, and understood red to mean “caution.” A different system prevailed in Cleveland, a different one in Chicago, a different one in Buffalo, and so on.
It’s easy to ignore
standards. But once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere. You realize how much relies on the silent coordination of extremely complex processes. And you start to earnestly wonder how society can go a day without bridges collapsing, planes dropping from the sky, appliances spontaneously exploding, and everything good burning up in a swelling ball of flame.
*
In 1900, after the war with Spain, the secretary of the Treasury put the issue of standards before Congress. It was a new world, he argued. Science and technology had made “exceedingly rapid progress,”5 and the country had just claimed new and far-flung territories. For this growing society to hold together, it would need standards.
Congress agreed and established the National Bureau of Standards. There was a lot of work to do. A few months after the devastating Baltimore conflagration, a fire broke out on the bureau’s grounds. The night watchman rushed to grab hoses—stored in different buildings—to extinguish it. But he encountered the Baltimore problem: the hoses couldn’t connect. He had to stamp out the fire with his feet.
The next day, a bureau employee remembered, “there was quite a discussion.”6 Even at the Bureau of Standards, hoses from two different buildings couldn’t be coupled.
It’s not hard to appreciate the bureau’s plight. Everybody wanted standards—it’s not as if manufacturers took pride in making incompatible hoses. It’s just that each firm desperately wanted its way of doing things to be the standard way, and for good reason. Losing a standards war meant having to retool, which might require purchasing expensive new machines. It meant seeing one’s existing stock become obsolete. And it meant paying those costs while a competitor—the one whose standard was adopted—got to race ahead unimpeded. With stakes that high, it was easy for firms to get locked into standards battles, leaving hapless firefighters cursing their incompatible hoses.
Resolving these paralyzing disputes was potentially a job for government. It helped that the bureau had, in the 1920s, one of the most trusted public officials at its helm: Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.7 Today Hoover is remembered as the president unfortunate enough to have been in office during the 1929 stock market crash. Yet the popular image of him as a bumbler misses a lot. He may have been a maladroit politician and a poor steward of the economy, but Hoover was an astonishingly capable bureaucrat. And there was little he cared about as much as standardization.
Herbert Hoover, as a man, can best be understood as the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt. Whereas Roosevelt lusted for combat and styled himself as a cowboy, Hoover was a Quaker who had lived for a year among Osages in Indian Country (he later had Charles Curtis,8 a Native American with Osage heritage, as his vice president). Roosevelt chafed at rules; Hoover once refused to let former president Benjamin Harrison into a college baseball game without a ticket.9 Roosevelt gave his horse the dramatic name Rain-in-the-Face; Hoover’s animal companion was a cat,10 whom he addressed as Mr. Cat.11 And whereas Roosevelt had a lifelong obsession with big game hunting, Hoover’s love was fishing, an activity he revered for its “quieting of hate,” “hushing to ambition,” and promotion of “meekness.”12
Perhaps the only thing you need to know about Herbert Hoover is that he wore a jacket and tie to fish.
Hoover made his fortune as an engineer and his fame organizing the relief of Belgium during World War I, an enormous logistical operation that required orchestrating the movement of more than five million tons of food by rail, ship, and canal boat. Though contemplated by both parties as a presidential candidate in 1920, Hoover instead became secretary of commerce. He’d been told by a predecessor that the job required merely turning the lighthouses out at night and putting the fish to bed,13 but for Hoover it was more than that. It was a calling.
The Great Standardizer: Herbert Hoover, fishing in a starched collar and a suit
As he saw it, the true problem with the economy was neither the injustice of capitalists nor the impatience of workers, but the inefficiency of objects. So much time and money were wasted on things that just didn’t work. Solve that problem, Hoover thought, and there’d be more than enough to go around. Standardizing and simplifying were, in his mind, the keys to prosperity. When he took his position as secretary, he rearranged the Commerce Department to ensure that he’d supervise the Bureau of Standards personally.
Under Hoover, the bureau developed a system.14 It would call a small group of industrial representatives to Washington, draft a standard based on their conversations, and then call a larger convention, again in Washington, to adopt or, in rare cases, amend the standard. Hoover insisted that the process be voluntary, as he doubted that imposed standards would gain adherents. But the mere act of the government calling an all-industry convention was often enough to secure agreement.
It started with a conference of brickmakers who,15 after a few hours with Hoover, agreed to reduce sixty-six varieties of paving brick to eleven (and eventually to five). Then came new standards for lumber,16 cement, doors, wood, steel, bedsprings, mattresses, hospital linen, ball bearings, and brake linings. Glass tumblers, it was decided, had to be able to withstand six hours in boiling water. Tires must have at least 70 percent new rubber on their treads. Red ink had to be a certain proportion of scarlet dye to water.
Hoover’s greatest challenge was one of the least visible: the humble screw thread. Screws, nuts, and bolts are universal fasteners. They function in industrial societies, as one writer put it, like salt and pepper “sprinkled on practically every conceivable kind of apparatus.”17 Yet every such society encounters, early on, the vexing problem of incompatible screw threads. Different screws have different measurements, including the thread angles. If those don’t line up between the males and the females, you are, so to speak, screwed.
“The screw thread is a simple device,”18 one senator put it, “but it ties together the whole mechanical skeleton of our civilization.”
Or it doesn’t. For the entire nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, screw threads were at the manufacturer’s discretion. The result was an anarchic profusion of standards and a civilization very much not tied together. A worker, Hoover complained, “had to find a bolt of the same make before he could screw a nut on it and had to search among a hundred different diameters.”19 And if the manufacturer who made your screws went out of business, good luck.
Screw thread incompatibilities grew even more worrisome with the advent of cars and planes—complex vibrating objects whose failure could mean death. The problem had hobbled the armed forces in the First World War, which led Congress to appoint a National Screw Thread Commission. Still, it took years, until 1924, before the first national screw thread standard was finally published. It wasn’t a big-splash innovation like the Model T or the airplane, but that hard-won screw thread standard quietly accelerated the economy nonetheless.
“Now the half-inch nuts screw onto all the half-inch bolts,”20 announced a satisfied Herbert Hoover.
*
Setting standards on the mainland was hard work. It went easier in the territories. There, industrial interest groups were weaker (when they existed at all) and the unelected government felt free to act with greater force. The exhausting business of cajoling manufacturers, calling conferences, and consulting with interested parties could be dispensed with. Authorities just declared standards and enforced them.
The ability of empires to promulgate standards was a major benefit of colonial conquest. Imperial standardization meant that even in faraway lands, the colonizers’ practices would be adhered to. Empires imprinted colonies with new laws, ideas, languages, sports, military conventions, fashions, weights and measures, rules of etiquette, money, and industrial practices. In fact, that’s what colonial officials spent much of their time doing.
There’s a reason, in other words, that the British measurement system (feet, yards, gallons, pounds, tons) is called the imperial system.21 Those weights and measures were promulgated to secure commensurability throughout Britain’s realm, far beyond
the British Isles. Even where local measures were used, they were defined in British terms, such as the Indian measure of mass called the maund, standardized in the nineteenth century to equal a hundred pounds.
Empires standardized people, too. Take nursing in the Philippines.22 Mainlanders venturing out to the colony needed the attention of nurses, particularly given the diseases that the war had unleashed. And yet, since few mainland nurses were willing to move to the Philippines, that meant relying on Filipinos. Soon after annexation the government began training them.
Nursing wasn’t new to the Philippines.23 There’d been hospitals in the country for centuries, and nurses had played an important part in the Philippine Revolution (Emilio Aguinaldo’s wife, Doña Hilaria, established a Filipino Red Cross to treat rebel soldiers). But the training the U.S. government offered was designed to aggressively overwrite previous Filipino and Spanish codes.24 Nursing students were hived off from the general population and placed in special dormitories where they studied English, cooked and ate mainland food, and learned mainland etiquette. They were drilled in mainland notions of hygiene. Sandals were replaced by shoes, long dresses by crisp gingham worn over stockings.
The Philippine schools were essentially satellites of mainland universities. The Philippine Medical School, for instance, copied its curriculum from Johns Hopkins. Promising Filipino nurses were brought to the mainland to study. The result was hospitals staffed not just by trained nurses but by mainland-trained nurses. This allowed freshly arrived mainlanders to fit easily into roles as teachers and supervisors, with little adjustment.
Aligning nursing practices in the Philippines with those of the mainland made the empire run smoother. But it has also had a profound unintended consequence. Once standards are firmly established, they are hard to dislodge, and the Philippines has remained, even after independence, extraordinarily U.S.-centric in its nursing practices. So, as the U.S. population has aged, requiring more health care, and as the Philippine economy has faltered, more and more nurses from the Philippines have left to work in the United States.25 Today, a massive pipeline carries tens of thousands of Filipino nurses to jobs in U.S. health centers.
How to Hide an Empire Page 34