How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  Territory still matters today. Colonialism hovers in the background of politics at the highest level. McCain, Palin, Obama, and Trump have all been touched by it. That may seem like an odd and surprising fact. But we should get over our surprise. The history of the United States is the history of empire.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS USED

  AHC American Historical Collection, Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University

  Albizu FBI File FBIPR Files, Pedro Albizu Campos, FBI File No. 105–11898, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York

  APP Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu

  Burnham Collection Daniel H. Burnham Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago

  CHF Othmer Library of Chemical History, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia

  CWS Chemical Warfare Service, Record Group 175, NACP

  DH Diplomatic History

  FDR Library Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum

  FO Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov

  Forbes Diary W. Cameron Forbes Diary, W. Cameron Forbes Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

  FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, DC)

  Gruening Papers Ernest Gruening Papers, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Archives and Manuscripts, University of Alaska, Fairbanks

  HC–DC Office of the High Commissioner of the Philippines, Records of the Washington, DC, Office, 1942–46, ROT

  HC–Manila Office of the High Commissioner of the Philippine Islands, Records of the Manila Office, 1935–46, ROT

  HC–Pol/Econ Office of the High Commissioner of the Philippines, Records Concerning Political and Economic Matters, 1927–1946, ROT

  HSA Hawai‘i State Archives, Honolulu

  HWRD Hawai‘i War Records Depository, Archives and Manuscripts Department, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa

  LTR The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cambridge, MA, 1952)

  MPD Maddison Project Database, January 2013 update, Groningen Growth and Development Centre, www.gddc.net/maddison/maddison-project/home.htm

  NACP United States National Archives, College Park, Maryland

  NADC United States National Archives, Washington, DC

  Nicholson Scrapbooks A. J. Nicholson, Scrapbooks Relating to the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

  NLP National Library of the Philippines, Manila

  Notter Records Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State, Records of Harley A. Notter, 1939–1945, NACP

  NYT The New York Times

  Padover File Specialized Functions, Records of the Research Unit on Territorial Policy, Reference File of Saul K. Padover, ROT

  Pershing Papers Papers of John J. Pershing, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

  Rem. Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (New York, 1964)

  Reynolds Papers Ruth M. Reynolds Papers, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York

  ROT Records of the Office of Territories, Record Group 126, NACP

  Stat. United States Statutes

  Tydings Papers Papers of Millard E. Tydings, Special Collections, Hornbake Library, University of Maryland, College Park

  WTR The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1926)

  INTRODUCTION: LOOKING BEYOND THE LOGO MAP

  1 Salanga: Alfrredo Navarro Salanga, “They Don’t Think Much About Us in America,” in Poems 1980–1988: Turtle Voices in Uncertain Weather (Manila, 1989), 180–81.

  2 The army’s official history: Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines (Washington, DC, 1953), 88.

  3 “Pearl Harbor” wasn’t how people: The etymology of that term, which debuted in the Portland Oregonian two days after the attack, is discussed in Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC, 2003), 16.

  4 japs bomb manila, hawaii, etc.: Beth Bailey and David Farber, “The Attack on Pearl Harbor … and Guam, Wake Island, Philippines, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong: December 7/8, the Pacific World, American Empire, and the American Political Imaginary,” in Pearl Harbor and the Attacks of December 8, 1941: A Pacific History, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, KS, forthcoming).

  5 Sumner Welles: Sumner Welles Papers, Speeches and Writings, “Speech Draft, December 8, 1941,” 16, FDR Library.

  6 Eleanor Roosevelt: Speech, December 7, 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Speech and Article File, December 1941–January 1942, FDR Library.

  7 “bombing in Oahu,” etc.: Draft 1, Significant Documents Collection, FDR Library.

  8 Polls taken: Earl S. Pomeroy, Pacific Outpost: American Strategy in Guam and Micronesia (Stanford, CA, 1951), 140. Another factor that probably contributed to Roosevelt’s editing of the manuscript was confusion as to whether the Philippines had been struck. It’s possible that Roosevelt’s inclusion and then deletion of the Philippines was in response to an initial false report that the Philippines had been hit and then a retraction. Yet Roosevelt continued to edit that same draft into the night of December 7, by which time the Philippines had been attacked and Roosevelt knew it—he penciled in the Philippines and Guam on the list of targets. If Roosevelt crossed the Philippines out because of the retraction, the question becomes why he didn’t, once he had a correct report of the Philippine raid, revert to his original “Hawaii and the Philippines” formulation (or, for that matter, change it to “Hawaii, the Philippines, and Guam”). On these issues, see my chapter and Bailey and Farber’s chapter in their edited collection, Pearl Harbor.

  9 “very much in passing,” etc.: John Hersey, Men on Bataan (New York, 1942), 365.

  10 called them, colonies: WTR, 11:250; Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (New York, 1902), 5:295.

  11 “The word colony”: Quoted in Rebecca Tinio McKenna, American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines (Chicago, 2017), 110.

  12 “logo map”: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York, 2006), 179. The theoretical foundation for the logo map is Thongchai Winichakul’s concept of the “geo-body” from Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu, 1994).

  13 Greater United States map: Inspired by Bill Rankin’s map, “The Territory of the United States,” 2007, radicalcartography.net/us-territory.

  14 “Greater United States”: Term discussed in Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” DH 40 (2016): 378–81.

  15 fifth largest: Bouda Etemad, Possessing the World: Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, trans. Andrene Everson (New York, 2007), 131.

  16 12.6 percent: This includes military personnel.

  17 one in twelve was African American: Immerwahr, “Greater United States,” 376. The count of African Americans includes those in the territories.

  18 seventh-grade girls: Letters collected in “World’s Colonies—General” folder, box 67; 9-0-1, Administrative, World’s Colonies; Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907–1951; ROT.

  19 “Although Hawaii”: Helen Johnson of Rand McNally to Donna Kowalski, circa 1942, in ibid.

  20 “We believe,” etc.: Barbara Frederick to Harold Ickes, January 14, 1943, in ibid.

  21 official clarified: Ruth Hampton to Barbara Frederick, January 30, 1943, in ibid.

  22 1910 report: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, vol. 1, Population: 1910 (Washington, DC, 1913), 17.

  23 “Most people”: Saul Padover, “The Overseas Expansion Policy of the U.S.,” c. 1943, “Reports” folder, box 12, Padover File.

  24 “global American emp
ire”: Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present, rev. ed. (New York, 1995), 492.

  25 “traveling the same path”: Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny (1999; Washington, DC, 2002), 6.

  26 case can be made: A helpful overview is Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review (2011): 1348–91.

  27 Du Bois: See especially his Dark Princess: A Romance (New York, 1928) and Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York, 1945).

  28 211 times in 67 countries: Barbara Salazar Torreon, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2016, Congressional Research Service Report R42738, 2016. This doesn’t count routine stationing of troops, covert operations, or disaster relief.

  29 “worst chapter”: James A. Field Jr., “American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 644–68.

  30 assiduously researched: Key works are listed in Immerwahr, “Greater United States.” Two very recent books are also worth mentioning: Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Anne Stephens, eds., Archipelagic American Studies (Durham, NC, 2017), and A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ, 2018).

  31 confusion and shoulder-shrugging: This can be seen not only in textbooks but higher up the academic food chain, in the flagship research journal in U.S. history, the Journal of American History. The Philippines was the United States’ largest colony by an order of magnitude, yet in the past fifty years the JAH has published only one research article about it (i.e., only one non-review article mentioning the Philippines in its title). That article, Walter L. Williams’s “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” was published in 1980. Inevitably, it covered 1898 and its immediate aftermath.

  32 Philippine bill was the basis: Alvita Akiboh, “Pocket-Sized Imperialism: U.S. Designs on Colonial Currency,” DH 41 (2017): 874.

  33 135 million: Immerwahr, “Greater United States,” 388.

  34 eight hundred overseas military bases: David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York, 2015), 4.

  35 Rankin: William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016).

  1. THE FALL AND RISE OF DANIEL BOONE

  1 Boone: In the following account, I’ve relied on John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York, 1992); Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, 1996); and Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Baton Rouge, LA, 2008).

  2 “So rich a soil”: Felix Walker, quoted in Brown, Frontiersman, 73.

  3 “first white man”: Timothy Flint, The First White Man of the West (Cincinnati, 1856).

  4 European literature: On Boone’s European reception, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT, 1973), chaps. 10–11.

  5 wasn’t much revered: Louise Phelps Kellogg, “The Fame of Daniel Boone,” Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 32 (1934): 187–98.

  6 “Had the horses”: New-York American, reprinted in the Alexandria Gazette, July 11, 1826.

  7 nation’s “refuse”: Benjamin Franklin, The Interest of Great Britain Considered, 1760, FO. On early scorn of frontier dwellers, see David Andrew Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (Charlottesville, VA, 2008).

  8 “no better”: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Others Essays, ed. Dennis D. Moore (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 33.

  9 “white savages”: John Jay to Thomas Jefferson, December 14, 1786, FO. I have modernized eighteenth-century capitalization throughout this chapter.

  10 “settling, or rather”: Washington to James Duane, September 7, 1783, FO.

  11 “exceedingly familiar and friendly”: Boone, quoted in Brown, Frontiersman, 137.

  12 This was exactly the sort: My account of Washington and the West draws heavily on Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York, 2005), chap. 4. Another crucial guide is Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of a Nation (New York, 2018).

  13 “murders, and general dissatisfaction”: September 12, 1784, The Diaries of George Washington, ed. Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig (Charlottesville, VA, 1978), 4:19.

  14 “labour very little,” etc.: Ibid., October 4, 1784, 4:66.

  15 “become too open, violent”: Washington to Jefferson, September 15, 1792, FO.

  16 “first and only”: Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York, 2005), 225.

  17 “compact” manner: Washington to Duane, September 7, 1793, FO. An excellent overview of the resistance to western settlement is Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ, 2017), chaps. 2–3.

  18 (55 percent) was covered by states: Calculated from Franklin K. Van Zandt, Boundaries of the United States and the Several States (Washington, DC, 1966), 262–64, and Thomas Donaldson, The Public Domain: Its History, with Statistics (Washington, DC, 1884), 87–88.

  19 “equal footing”: Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787, 1 Stat. 51, section 14, article 5.

  20 “In effect”: Monroe to Jefferson, May 11, 1786, FO.

  21 “despotic oligarchy”: Jefferson to Henry Innes, January 23, 1800, FO.

  22 “poor devil”: St. Clair to Alexander Hamilton, August 9, 1793, FO.

  23 “dependent colony” … “citizens” … “subjects”: Arthur St. Clair, quoted in Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 71.

  24 “white Indians”: Quoted in Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, OH, 1986), 8.

  25 “ignorant” … “ill qualified”: St. Clair, quoted in Onuf, Statehood and Union, 70. On the imperial features of territorial government, see (besides above-cited works by Onuf, Cayton, and Frymer) Whitney T. Perkins, Denial of Empire: The United States and Its Dependencies (Leiden, Netherlands, 1962), chap. 1; Jack Ericson Eblen, The First and Second United States Empires: Governors and Territorial Government, 1784–1912 (Pittsburgh, 1968), chap. 2; and Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York, 2011), chap. 1.

  26 “This Constitution never was”: Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d sess., 1811, 537.

  27 “incapable of self-government”: Quoted in Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence, KS, 2006), 22.

  28 largest contingent of the army: Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, CT, 2004), 90.

  29 “mental darkness” … “dangerous experiment”: Quoted in Perkins, Denial of Empire, 21.

  30 “Do political axioms”: Pierre Sauve, Pierre Derbigny, and Jean Noël Destrehan, “Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana Against the Political System Adopted by Congress for Them,” 1804, in American State Papers, 10, Miscellaneous, 1:397.

  31 did nothing: Kastor, Nation’s Crucible, 58–60.

  32 “cover the whole” … “distant times”: Jefferson to James Monroe, November 24, 1801, FO. On Jeffersonians versus Federalists regarding territorial government, see Cayton, Frontier Republic.

  33 “wide and fruitful”: Jefferson, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, APP.

  34 “I told him no”: Robert R. Livingston to James Madison, April 11, 1803, FO.

  35 “the best use”: Jefferson to John Breckinridge, August 12, 1803, FO.
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br />   36 “shut up”: Jefferson to John Dickinson, August 9, 1803, FO.

  37 “advancing compactly”: Jefferson to Breckinridge, August 12, 1803, FO.

  38 European populations had grown: MPD.

  39 the best available statistics: Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Franklin as Demographer,” Journal of Economic History 9 (1949): 25–26.

  40 Disease took so many: Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 82.

  41 one to two miles a year: Dale Van Every, Ark of Empire: The American Frontier, 1784–1803 (New York, 1963), 21.

  42 Franklin was the first: Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. (Boston, 1755), 9. On the foundation for Franklin’s calculations, see William F. Von Valtier, “‘An Extravagant Assumption’: The Demographic Numbers Behind Benjamin Franklin’s Twenty-Five-Year Doubling Period,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155 (2011): 158–88.

  43 “rapidity of increase”: Thomas Robert Malthus, First Essay on Population (London, 1798), 105.

  44 Malthus, in turn: Joyce E. Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin’s Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity (Washington, DC, 2009), 45.

  45 1890 census: Conway Zirkle, “Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Malthus and the United States Census,” Isis 48 (1957): 62.

  46 surpassed that of Britain: MPD.

  47 population of France: U.S. and French figures from MPD. For my understanding of U.S. population growth, I am indebted to D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT, 1993), and James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, UK, 2009).

  48 nearly forty miles a year: Van Every, Ark of Empire, 21.

  49 influxes from Europe and Africa: Michael R. Haines, “The Population of the United States, 1790–1920,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 2:153.