How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  At this point, not only are Filipino nurses training in preparation for emigration, but Filipino doctors are retraining as nurses so that they too can find work abroad.

  Medical expertise flows out of the country, money flows in. It’s had a mixed effect. But the point here is that the easy flow, which has made the Philippines the United States’ top supplier of foreign nurses since the 1960s, is not the consequence of markets alone. The Philippines has a competitive advantage because of the generations of nurses who learned their craft precisely to U.S. standards.

  The half-inch nuts screw onto the half-inch bolts.

  *

  Men like Herbert Hoover standardized the mainland. Colonial rulers then imposed those standards on the territories. But both processes stopped at the border. Within the Greater United States, one way of doing things prevailed. Foreign countries had their own nursing practices and screw thread angles.

  In Hoover’s day, it was hard to imagine changing that. Getting brick manufacturers in one country to agree had been difficult enough. Who was going to get French brickmakers into agreement with Japanese ones? The difficulty of standardizing across jurisdictions explains why countries through the first half of the twentieth century had largely distinct material cultures.

  The First World War drove this point home. The United States sent its troops to Europe. They found, on arriving, that Europeans used different weapons, had a different sizing system for uniforms, and measured distance differently.

  They also found that there wasn’t much they could do about it. The U.S. Army was fighting an away game, so it made uncomfortable adjustments. It switched over to the metric system for the war’s duration,26 manufacturing metric provisions, issuing metric maps, and giving its orders in metric units. Fighting in kilometers and kilograms wasn’t easy for men who’d grown up with miles and pounds, but that was the price of coordinating with their French allies.

  Standards clashed again in the Second World War. This time the problem was even worse. This time the United States wasn’t sending only men and money to Europe. It was supplying a relentless torrent of stuff to theaters all over the world.

  It was doing this even before it formally entered the war, a practice that Roosevelt strove to justify to a hesitant public. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire,27 and I have a length of garden hose,” he argued in a famous analogy. “If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire.”

  It was a metaphor, obviously. But it isn’t hard to picture Herbert Hoover in the back of the room, raising his hand. What if your hose doesn’t fit his hydrant?

  That would have been a good question to ask. The United States made guns with 0.30-inch cartridges; the British Empire used 0.303-inch cartridges. Similarly, British bombs didn’t fit the racks on U.S. planes. A Canadian naval officer deemed it a “frightful commentary”28 on the state of international cooperation that at the start of the war, “there was not a single gun or a single round of ammunition” that could be shared among the Allies.

  It was even worse than that. The British had adopted a 55-degree thread angle for their screws, whereas the U.S. standard, in which Hoover took so much pride, was 60 degrees. It was as if the things themselves spoke different languages. “We can’t borrow parts from the British,”29 one U.S. mechanic complained. “We can’t even steal them. They don’t fit.”

  In the First World War, which was still fought with horses, industrial incompatibilities among allies had been inconvenient. Now, in a war of jeeps and bombers, they were crippling. When the U.S. manufacturer Packard contracted to make engines for British planes, its engineers spent ten months redrawing some two thousand British blueprints to translate them into the U.S. screw system. Throughout the war, the United States spent $600 million sending spare screws,30 nuts, and bolts overseas to compensate for the incompatibility.

  Wartime poster illustrating the problem with noncompliant parts

  Could manufacturers not just adopt European standards, as they had in the last war? Perhaps. The British and French spent $84 million to establish and expand factories in the United States that were capable of making European-style aircraft engines,31 essentially planting European industrial outposts on U.S. soil. The U.S. Army also adopted some items of the British arsenal as its own and built racks for British bombs.32

  Yet deferring to European standards only made sense if Europe was the heart of the Allied war economy, and Europe soon lost its centrality. The fall of France and bombing of Britain took European factories off-line. At the same time, U.S. manufacturing kicked into high gear. By the war’s end,33 the United States had produced 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, and 41 billion rounds of small ammunition. The war against Hitler may have been a European fight, but it was very much made in the U.S.A.

  The more U.S. factories made, the more fine-grained their standardization became. The goal, as two prominent experts put it, was “the integration of the entire process into a smooth flow like a great river system.”34 That meant not just making parts from the same factory interchangeable, but also making them interchangeable across factories, indeed across industries—all of which required mind-boggling levels of precision.

  Consider the Fenn Manufacturing company,35 which produced specialized machinery. Before the war, its vice president explained, no one had ever heard of making parts with tolerances of plus-or-minus 0.0002 inches. Anyone suggesting such precision would have been deemed “absolutely insane.” But that’s what the vast military economy demanded, and Fenn was forced to retool virtually its whole plant. It had to install a constant-temperature room to check fixtures and gauges for minuscule variations.

  In Washington, engineers turned out “war standards” with ferocity. It was the same ballet between governmental officials and industrial leaders that Herbert Hoover had choreographed, danced at twice the tempo. Standardizers gamely wrote specifications for new materials, new equipment, and new designs. At its wartime peak in 1944, the budget of the National Bureau of Standards was 7.5 times larger than it had been a decade earlier.36

  All this turned the United States into the undisputed standard-setter for the Allies. The war had united their economies, but Washington set the terms of the union.

  You could see this in Australia. As a British dominion, Australia had adhered to British standards before the war, with some local variations. Yet it didn’t take long for it to tip into the gravity well of the United States’ war economy.

  The key period was from 1942 to 1944, after Douglas MacArthur abandoned the Philippines but before the United States could fully provision his troops via the mainland. MacArthur still relied on the United States for ships and weapons, but for high-volume, low-value items such as food and clothing, Australia became the source. At peak, some 15 percent of Australia’s national income came from meeting MacArthur’s procurement orders.37

  Meeting those orders was a challenge, especially when it came to food. Australian farmers often worked small plots, weeding by hand and selling to local markets. Machines played a small role in crop cultivation, and safety measures such as milk pasteurization were costly luxuries, ill suiting the farmer’s-market milieu of Australian agriculture.38

  All that would have to change. The United States sent over experts, agricultural missionaries bearing machines, herbicides, and fungicides. Their charge? Transform a continent.

  They bombarded farmers with lectures, radio broadcasts, educational films, leaflets, and field demonstrations, all to teach the U.S. way of farming. Australian manufacturers were given models of U.S. tractors, mowers, harvesters, and dusters and taught how to make them. Australian canners learned to can the army way. Dairy farmers were ordered to pasteurize their milk and test their cows for tuberculin. Given the sheer size of MacArthur’s purchase orders, to resist would have been economic suicide.

  “Almost every phase of Australia’s food industry has been profoundly affected by the activities of
the remarkable team of specialists brought out here for the US to guide and advise us,”39 wrote one witness to the transformation.

  Tastes changed, too. Australian troops used to mutton watched as their U.S. allies consumed much larger rations built around beef, pork, and ham and supplemented with spaghetti, coffee, and eggs. It was decided that serving different rations to different troops would be too dispiriting to the Australians. So they, too, started eating U.S. rations. Australian meat-packers, for their part, got the hang of making new foods: chili con carne, corned beef hash, ham and eggs, luncheon meat, Vienna sausage.

  The entire Australian shoe industry was similarly overturned as shoe-makers retooled to make shoes in U.S. sizes rather than British ones. With sixty thousand pairs of shoes ordered a month for army use, they couldn’t afford not to.

  “Without any inhibitions of any kind,”40 announced Australia’s prime minister early in the war, “I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” In the realm of standards, that was an unavoidable truth. Politically, Australia remained British. But materially, it looked a lot like a U.S. colony.

  *

  Australia was just the start. During the war, the Allies formed a standards coordinating committee with headquarters in New York and London.41 It oversaw agreements on repair parts for aircraft, the width of rail lines, and radio broadcasting frequencies. Generally, these agreements specified that U.S. standards would be adopted, since the United States’ planes, trains, and radios were essential to the war. In 1943 the British signaled that they were willing to talk screw threads.

  A British mission traveled to New York that year. For nearly two weeks,42 some thirty experts debated screws, pipe threads, gas cylinder threads, hose couplings, and cylindrical fits. Everyone agreed that “unification” of the Anglophone countries was essential. But unification on whose terms? The U.S. representatives suggested that the British Empire retool. The British agreed to think about it.

  A longer summit followed in London.43 Bombs dropped overhead in an “unending stream,”44 reported the president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Perhaps the bombardment softened the British up. The U.S. delegates had planned to spring the subject of unification on the British at the last moment, but to their surprise the British brought it up immediately. Abandoning 55-degree screws for 60-degree ones would devastate British manufacturers. But given the exigencies of war, they were willing to try it temporarily.

  One thread to rule them all: The 1945 standard

  A third conference in Ottawa in 1945 clinched the deal.45 This time the battered British delegates simply surrendered. Britain would wholeheartedly accept a new standard, with a screw thread angle of 60 degrees. British manufacturers would retool. U.S. manufacturers, by contrast, would barely notice the shift, since screws made under the new Anglophone standard were practically interchangeable with screws made under the old national agreement that Herbert Hoover had secured.

  It was, as they say, an important event in pipe history.

  *

  The same month the Anglophone powers agreed on a screw thread, they established the International Organization for Standardization (better known by its short-form name, ISO). It was to be a United Nations for things. It had an administrative committee modeled after the UN’s Security Council: permanent seats for the five great powers (United States, Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union) and rotating seats for other countries. The first president was from the United States.

  One of the first topics ISO discussed was, of course, screw threads. Peace and prosperity called for global unification. But the British refused to revamp again, noting that they had already endured considerable hardship in adopting the 60-degree standard. Nor was the United States open to change. The other powers grumbled that the United States and Britain had “beaten the gun” in international standardization.46 Still, faced with the combined bulk of the British and U.S. empires, there was little they could do. Bowing to inevitability, they voted overwhelmingly to adopt the Anglophone thread angle as the international one (the Soviet Union was the only member to vote no). Countries could still use their national standards, but if they wanted international compatibility, their screw thread angles would need to be 60 degrees.

  Quite a lot of things, in fact, would have to be remade to a metaphorical 60-degree angle. The war had stripped economies down, and now they sought to rebuild themselves by tapping into a world market. Yet that market was dominated by the United States, which accounted for an astonishing 60 percent of the industrialized world’s economic production in 1946.47 “America is our largest buyer,48 our largest seller,” noted French standardizers. And so agreement after agreement affirmed the centrality of the United States.

  The United States wasn’t just an economic superpower, it was a military one, too. Its vast armed forces had been agents of standardization during the Second World War, and they continued to be so afterward, during the Cold War. Washington flooded the world with its arms and equipment. In accepting them, foreign militaries had to adopt U.S. standards as well.

  The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) pushed standardization even further. It established a permanent military alliance of twelve countries, the first of its kind. This alliance turned military standardization from an acute wartime problem into a chronic peacetime one, which NATO administrators solved by going through the supply catalog and, one by one, standardizing items in it. They started with rifles, which were put on the U.S. system of 0.30-inch cartridges. By 1953, the U.S. representative to NATO’s Defense Production Board bragged, fighter planes featuring Belgian engines perfectly fit Dutch frames.49 A medical standardization program had just begun, too, and he expected that within two or three years “a British stretcher will fit the trolleys of an American ambulance, and a Turkish needle will fit on a French syringe.”

  In 1953 the leading British standards journal filled an issue with articles reprinted from its counterpart journal in New York.50 It was a remarkable capitulation—in standards, the British were now just taking dictation.

  The Third World was taking notes,51 too. Poorer countries found it hard to set standards themselves—laboratories, conferences, and journals cost money—and they had strong incentives to use the standards of their richer trading partners. And so, just as European powers flocked to U.S. standards, their former colonies did the same. U.S. engineers helped by advising foreign governments and staffing overseas field offices for standards associations.

  It was a worthwhile investment. By exporting its standards, Harry Truman noted, the United States was “smoothing the flow of international trade” and “enabling buyers and sellers in different nations to speak the same language.”52 He didn’t need to specify whose language was spoken.

  *

  In industry after industry, the world tuned itself to the United States. This happened literally in music, where countries bickered over the pitch of a concert A. The United States had been tuning its instruments to an A of 440 hertz since 1917.53 But continental Europe was officially tuned to the “French pitch,” a slightly flatter A of 435 hertz, closer to the classical pitches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Austrian delegates pushed for A435 at the United Nations. Yet with U.S. recordings flooding the market and the U.S. government broadcasting a pure A440 tone around the world from powerful radio stations in Maryland and Hawai‘i as a “service” to musicians, the Austrians stood little chance. Today, except for those playing period instruments such as baroque flutes or older church organs, A440 is the law of the land.

  Something similar happened in the skies. International aviation relies on standards. Air traffic controllers and pilots must speak the same language, plane parts must be similar enough that repairs can be made in any country, and the world’s radio frequencies must be arranged so that the navigational channels in one country are the same as in the next. Representatives of the U.S. aviation indu
stry worked aggressively to secure all these objectives and to make sure that the language of the air was English. By 1950, they had largely succeeded.

  It’s not shocking that aviation is strictly standardized, given its frequently international character. More impressive is what the United States did to ground travel. For the first half of the twentieth century, traffic engineers in the United States had been concerned with securing nationwide standards—traffic light colors, signs, and so forth. Yet in 1953 the deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Public Roads explained that “we now think in terms of world-wide uniformity.”54

  Worldwide uniformity. Had this been the ambition of a transportation official from, say, Thailand, it would have been laughable. Yet from the United States it was wholly feasible. That year, the international Convention on a Uniform System of Road Signs and Signals reproduced the U.S. practices with remarkable fidelity. Traffic light colors, pavement striping rules, and even to a large degree road signs followed the U.S. system, including the well-known yellow octagon with the word stop printed on it.55

  Wait—yellow? Yes. The octagonal stop sign came from Michigan, born when a Detroit police sergeant clipped the corners off a square sign to give it a more distinctive shape. But the early signs were yellow, not red. The first national agreement of U.S. state highway professionals rejected the use of red on any sign, since it was hard to see at night. So the U.S. stop sign, adopted as an international standard in 1953, was yellow.