How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  Yet just a year later, in 1954, the United States changed its mind about the yellow.56 Experts thought that red better signified danger, and new developments in industrial chemistry allowed for durable, reflective red finishes. So, to what I can only imagine was the apoplectic fury of traffic engineers worldwide, the United States abandoned the global standard—its own standard, designed in Michigan and foisted on the world—and began to replace its yellow signs with red ones.

  This, more than anything, showed the stupefying privilege the United States enjoyed in the realm of standards. It could force other countries to adopt its screw thread angle in the name of international cooperation. But it was never bound by those imperatives itself.

  This unique exemption from international standards is not a secret. You see it every day in the realm of weights and measures. While other countries have reconciled themselves to the metric system, designed by the French in the late eighteenth century, the United States has held out. As late as 1971, an extraordinary 56 percent of mainlanders claimed to not even be aware of the metric system.57

  The ongoing U.S. rejection of metric measures leads to frequent annoyance and occasional catastrophe—a Boeing 767 plane carrying dozens that lost power midair because its fuel load had been mistakenly calculated in pounds, a Mars probe that disintegrated because of U.S. software that used pounds rather than kilograms. Although the United States secured worldwide adoption of its screw thread angle, it has squandered part of that advantage by sticking (in some contexts) to screws measured in inches, which aren’t compatible with those measured metrically. Still, the United States has refused to relinquish its inches, pounds, and gallons. It stands with Myanmar, Liberia, the Independent State of Samoa, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands as the sole holdouts against the metric system.58

  If it is the privilege of the United States to depart from international standards, it has been the burden of the rest of the world to indulge it. Two years after the United States finished switching its stop signs from yellow to red, the United Nations convened a grand meeting of 134 nations to revisit the issue of traffic signs.59 The yellow octagon was dropped for a red one (an inverted red triangle in a red circle was also given official imprimatur, though few nations chose it). The United States didn’t even sign the new agreement, yet its standard prevailed.

  Today, the empire of the red octagon is global. There are minor variations: in Japan it’s a red triangle, in Papua New Guinea it’s a red shield, and in Cuba it’s a red triangle in a red circle. But by my count, at least 91 percent of the world’s population stops at red octagons.60 Even the North Koreans do.

  *

  The stop sign can be added to the list of empire-killing technologies. Taken together, they have had a formidable effect. Synthetics diminished the great powers’ need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes. Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication networks without worrying about contiguous territorial access. Innovations in medicine and engineering—such as DDT, antimalarials, plastic-based packaging, and “world-proofed” electronic equipment—further reduced the need for territorial control. They allowed objects and humans to safely travel to hostile terrains, meaning that colonizers didn’t have to soften the ground beforehand.

  Standardization, similarly, made foreign places more accessible. Standards had been facilitating long-distance trade for centuries before World War II, of course, but mainly within political jurisdictions. You had to colonize to standardize, roughly speaking (and with important exceptions). What changed in the Second World War was scale. The United States took advantage of its position—as the undisputed economic and political superpower, with its wartime logistical network installed in more than a hundred countries—to push its standards beyond its borders. The wave of U.S.-centered standardization that followed transcended the scale of the nation or the empire. This was standardization at the scale of the planet.

  Together with the other empire-killing technologies, global standards changed the rules of the game. Powerful countries had long secured their ability to both claim resources and move around the planet by controlling land. Those were the rules the United States had played by when it expanded westward and overseas. Those were the rules Germany and Japan had played by in the Second World War. By those rules, the end of the war had brought the United States to the dizzying heights of imperial possibility. It had new ambitions and every chance to back those ambitions by seizing territory. Had it done so, it could have locked down a resource base and a strategic position unrivaled in history.

  That the United States declined to follow victory with annexations—that instead it decolonized—cannot be explained by a sudden onset of altruism. It was due in part to the revolt of colonized peoples worldwide. It was also due to the lessons learned in the war. Fighting and winning that war had taught Washington the art of projecting power without claiming colonies. New technologies helped it achieve, as a writer in the forties put it, “domination without annexation.”61

  Those technologies laid the foundation for our world today. It’s a far cry from the world Teddy Roosevelt envisioned, in which the strong violently subdue the weak and take their land. It is much closer to the one Herbert Hoover imagined, held together not by empires, but by the market. It’s a world where the great coordinating process isn’t colonial rule,62 which operates within borders, but globalization, which crosses them.

  The replacement of colonialism with globalization, it should be said, hasn’t exactly leveled the playing field. A previously bumpy world may have become “flat,”63 as the pundit Thomas L. Friedman has put it. But who flattened it? For the most part, it was the U.S. military, seeking to project power around the planet. Given that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that globalization, at least at first, favored the United States. U.S. planes filled the skies, U.S. broadcasts flooded the airwaves, U.S.-made synthetic goods replaced colonial ones, and U.S. standards held it all together.

  Not all those advantages have endured. Today, China makes more plastic than the United States does. Yet even if it has not won every match, the United States has consistently enjoyed a sizable home-court advantage. It has had the luxury of sticking to its ways while forcing other countries to retool their factories and retune their instruments. The benefits of this are many. Yet one sticks out and is worth special examination. That is the global adoption of a single language: English.

  19

  LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS

  In 1620 a group of English settlers, known today as the Pilgrims, arrived on the shores of North America. They’d been at sea for more than two months—an arduous voyage that killed two of their number.

  That was, it turned out, the easy part. The settlers landed in an unfamiliar place where they had no friends. They tried to grow food but failed badly. In the first winter, more than half died from disease and starvation. A group of Indians, the Pauquunaukit Wampanoag, watched them flail from afar. Finally, in the spring, after many of the colonists had perished, the Pauquunaukit sent over an emissary, a man named Samoset.

  He greeted them in English.

  Samoset, it turned out, had learned some “broken English”1 (as one colonist described it) from fishermen plying the Maine coast. A few days later, Samoset returned with a Patuxet man who spoke the language even better: Tisquantum, better known as Squanto. Not only did Squanto speak English, he’d lived in London. Seven years before meeting the Plymouth colonists, he had been kidnapped by an English captain and taken to Europe. He’d sailed across the Atlantic four times—once after being captured, once back and forth on a journey to Newfoundland, and back again with another expedition to his homeland of Patuxet—i.e., southern New England.

  For the colonists, who had crossed the Atlantic only once, this was a near-inconceivable stroke of luck. A small, nomadic band of Europeans far out of their element had somehow managed to run
into one of the few individuals from the vast North American continent who had actually spent time in their home country. Squanto was, in the eyes of the colonists, a “special instrument sent of God.”2 He translated for them, brokered key diplomatic alliances with Native polities, and taught them the tricks of local agriculture. Quite likely he was the difference between their survival and their death.

  Today, four centuries later, the society those Pilgrims founded enjoys a similar good fortune. Its inhabitants can travel to nearly any spot on the map, confident that someone within hailing distance will speak their language. Yet unlike the Pilgrims, they don’t need luck. English has spread like an invasive weed, implanting itself in nearly every habitat. It has created a world full of people ready and able to assist English speakers, wherever they may roam. A world almost designed for the convenience of the United States.

  A world of Squantos.

  *

  Languages are standards, just like stop signs and screw threads, but they run much deeper. Languages shape thought, making some ideas more readily thinkable and others less so. At the same time, they shape societies. Which languages you speak affects which communities you join, which books you read, which places you feel at home. That a single language has become the dominant tongue on the planet, spoken to a degree by nearly all educated and powerful people, is thus an occurrence of profound consequence.

  It is particularly astonishing because there is no historical precedent for it. Scholars had used Latin widely in Western Europe, but it never achieved the universality sometimes attributed to it. Other languages from Spanish to Swahili have also knit regions together, but none has done more than that. The norm in history has been linguistic difference, not sameness.

  That was certainly true of the United States at its start: a polyglot crazy quilt of Native American,3 African, and European tongues. Even Ben Franklin, restricting himself to the European languages, felt it necessary to master French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin along with his native English. He published a newspaper in German, Die Philadelphische Zeitung, and suspected that German might displace English in Pennsylvania.

  Franklin was right to wonder. There were serious questions about whether English would hold throughout the new United States. There’d never been a native language that stretched over such a large distance as the expanding United States without splitting apart. That it worked—that Virginians spoke the same language as Californians—can be credited to the settlement boom, which swiftly propelled a fairly homogeneous population over a vast expanse. The same wagons and trains that carried the settlers carried the language, too, which survived the long journey with only minor mutations.

  Outside of the settler population, though, enforcing English as a national language proved to be a more violent undertaking. Slave owners made a point of separating African slaves who spoke the same language. Those caught speaking their home languages could face serious punishment; there are reports of some having their tongues cut out.4 The result was total linguistic annihilation. Although traces of African idioms can be found in today’s black speech,5 not a single African language made it over on the slave ships and survived.

  Indigenous languages were sites of conflict, too. Starting in the late nineteenth century, reformers pushed tens of thousands of Native American children into white-run boarding schools. There, cut off from their families and communities, the students studied English. “We shall break up all the Indian there is in them in a very short time,”6 promised the founder of one such school. Students caught speaking indigenous languages were routinely beaten or had their mouths washed with soap and lye.7 Not surprisingly, Indian parents were rarely enthusiastic about this, but governmental officials and school administrators used bribes, threats,8 the withholding of rations, and outright force—essentially kidnapping the children—to fill the schools.

  Authorities tried the same tactics in the overseas territories. “They beat the language out of us in school,”9 remembered one elderly Alaska Native. “Whenever I speak Tlingit, I can still taste the soap,” another confirmed (his language now has fewer than a thousand speakers). On Guam, the naval government prohibited the use of Chamoru on school grounds,10 in courts, and in governmental offices. Children caught speaking it in schools would be beaten or fined. One naval officer collected all the Chamoru dictionaries he could find and burned them.11

  Yet the empire was vast, and there simply weren’t enough colonial officials to wash out every offending mouth. So the government relied on other tools. It passed laws in English, demanded that civil servants use English, and, in the U.S. Virgin Islands,12 made English proficiency a requirement for voting. Most important, colonial authorities turned to education. Inculcating English was the “cardinal point”13 of the whole Philippine school system, explained the superintendent of education there. Across the empire, students were expected, at least at the higher grades, to work in English.

  Committed anticolonialists, such as Emilio Aguinaldo, resisted—he died in 1964 still unable to speak English. Pedro Albizu Campos spoke the language well, but he came to regard it as an instrument of imperialism. “I am astounded that the Puerto Ricans have tolerated this mutilation of the mentality of their children,”14 he told his followers. “The United States wants not only to destroy our culture and disintegrate our nation, but also to destroy our language” and “force upon us their culture and language, casting out our books and substituting theirs.”

  Local instructors proved less than steadfast in their dedication to the imperial tongue. A report on Philippine schools found that the students were being taught English “by teachers who themselves cannot speak English,”15 and a former governor complained that their accents were sliding into incomprehensibility.16 The governor of Puerto Rico accused local teachers of giving English lessons “with a left-handed gesture.”17 Teachers there organized a stubborn resistance to anglicization,18 even at the cost of being blacklisted and fired.

  Overall, English proficiency rose, but slowly. By 1940, roughly a quarter of Puerto Ricans and Filipinos could speak the language.19 In Hawai‘i, a polyglot pidgin was still the language of the streets.20

  *

  The wider world was no better. Among Western countries, English deferred routinely to its rivals. French was the language of diplomacy. In science, French was joined by German and (in chemistry) Russian. As late as 1932, French was allowed as an official language at 98.5 percent of international scientific conferences,21 whereas English was accepted only at 83.5 percent.

  If English speakers wanted to talk with foreigners, they needed to master other languages. That’s what Ben Franklin had done in the eighteenth century, and that’s what his successors did in the twentieth. Teddy Roosevelt, though obsessed with the “English-speaking peoples,” spoke French and German and could follow along in Italian. Woodrow Wilson,22 the era’s other scholar-president, read German scholarship and contemplated moving to Europe to better learn the language. Herbert Hoover ranged even further. He had tried to learn Osage as a boy,23 his first publication was a translation of a sixteenth-century Latin treatise on mining, and he and his wife, Lou, used Mandarin (learned while living in China) when they wished to speak privately.24 The polyglot presidency was a reaction to a world teeming with languages, a world where English got you only so far.

  The limits of English became painfully clear during the Second World War. “It was then,”25 recalled a prominent philologist, “that many of us realized that foreign languages have actual, objective reality, that there are large areas of the earth where, strange as it may seem, English is neither spoken nor understood.” The United States had built for itself a “neat little world in which everyone spoke English,” he noted. Yet “suddenly these pesky foreigners rose up before us in their own lands, doggedly refusing to understand our tongue, no matter how slowly and loudly we spoke it. It was little short of outrageous.”

  The army launched a training program to give soldiers a crash course in the language
s they’d need to fight a global war. Eventually it encompassed some forty languages (and it pioneered the “audio-lingual” method used in classrooms today). But training an army of millions to speak the dozens of languages its men might encounter as they hopped from continent to continent was wholly impractical.

  It really would be better if the foreigners could learn English.

  *

  As Allied leaders contemplated how the world might look after the war, they thought about language. “The empires of the future are empires of the mind,”26 Winston Churchill announced in 1943 in a speech at Harvard. The key to that mental colonization, he believed, was linguistic. Churchill invited Harvard students to imagine the “grand convenience” that English speakers would enjoy if their language were used globally. No longer hemmed in by territorial empires, they’d be able to “move freely about the world.”

  It was a stirring vision. Yet it was also, Churchill recognized, far from reality. English wasn’t a global lingua franca in 1943, and it didn’t seem likely to become one anytime soon. It had a daunting vocabulary, with its largest dictionaries containing some half a million words. Its spelling was a cruel farce. Even Albert Einstein had been brought to his knees by what he called English’s “underhanded orthography.”27

  Churchill took these concerns seriously. In his Harvard speech, he declared his support for Basic, a drastically reduced version of English containing 850 words, only 18 of them verbs (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, see, say, send, may, and will). Basic was English for foreigners. The entire system—grammar and vocabulary—could be printed legibly on one side of a sheet of paper, with space left over for sample sentences.