Book Read Free

How to Hide an Empire

Page 47

by Daniel Immerwahr


  50 “Wave after wave”: Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bouh, Organization of a New Indian Territory East of the Missouri River (New York, 1850), 3.

  51 the cities the settlers built: On Cincinnati and Chicago: Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 196, 1.

  52 “homesteads”: This transformation is helpfully discussed in Frymer, Building an American Empire, and Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, DC, 1968), chaps. 10 and 15.

  53 “most infamous system”: Earl S. Pomeroy, The Territories and the United States, 1861–1890: Studies in Colonial Administration (Philadelphia, 1947), 104.

  54 Appointed governors … new territories: Eblen, First and Second U.S. Empires, 140.

  55 “manifest destiny”: “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July–August 1845, 5. Though the unsigned article has long been attributed to the magazine’s editor, John L. O’Sullivan, Linda S. Hudson has used textual analysis to argue that it was “likely written” by Jane Cazneau. Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807–1878 (Austin, TX, 2001), 61.

  2. INDIAN COUNTRY

  1 Thornton: Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman, OK, 1987), 32. Low and high estimates, respectively, from Alfred L. Kroeber and Henry F. Dobyns, are assessed and extrapolated at 25–26.

  2 closer to half a million: Paul Stuart, Nations Within a Nation: Historical Statistics of American Indians (New York, 1987), 52.

  3 the population started rebounding: Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln, NE, 1990), chap. 3. The following account of the Cherokees draws on Gary E. Moulton, John Ross: Cherokee Chief (Athens, GA, 1978); Theda Purdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York, 2007); and Brian Hicks, Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears (New York, 2011).

  4 “It’s like Baltimore”: Hicks, Setting Sun, 148.

  5 “like the whiteman”: John Ross, “To the Senate,” March 8, 1836, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, ed. Gary E. Moulton (Norman, OK, 1978), 1:394.

  6 “would not be countenanced”: Andrew Jackson, Annual Message, December 8, 1829, APP.

  7 “removal beyond” … “protection and peace”: Quoted in Moulton, Ross, 38.

  8 “We can’t be a Nation”: Ibid., 51.

  9 a third or half of what it would have been: Estimate is for the total population, not just the removed Cherokees. Thornton, Cherokees, 76.

  10 “admitted as a state”: House Committee on Indian Affairs, H. Rep 474, Regulating the Indian Department, 23d Cong., 1st sess., 1834, 14.

  11 “not republican” … “despotism”: Register of Debates, 23d Cong., 2d sess., February 20, 1835, 1447.

  12 “add to our Union”: Register of Debates, 23d Cong., 1st sess., June 25, 1834, 4776.

  13 “I am not prepared”: Register of Debates, 23d Cong., 2d sess., February 20, 1835, 1454.

  14 “full-blood savage”: Ibid.

  15 farming equipment, etc.: D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, CT, 1993), 2:99–100.

  16 “effectual and complete”: Register of Debates, 23d Congress, 1st sess., June 25, 1834, 4764.

  17 “Indian barrier” … “Where will they go?”: William E. Unrau, The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825–1855 (Lawrence, KS, 2007), 125–26. See also Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln, NE, 2011), part II.

  18 “She didn’t know”: Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Little House Books, ed. Caroline Fraser (New York, 2012), 287.

  19 “‘When white settlers’”: Ibid., 366.

  20 “I’ll not stay”: Ibid., 401.

  21 Osages: Dennis McAuliffe Jr., The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: An American History (New York, 1994), 110–17. See also Frances W. Kaye, “Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Kansas Indians,” Great Plains Quarterly 20 (2000): 123–40.

  22 “The question will suggest”: McAuliffe, Sybil Bolton, 116.

  23 By 1879, it contained: Roy Gittinger, The Formation of the State of Oklahoma, 1803–1906 (1917; Norman, OK, 1939), 264–65.

  24 “We are here”: Congressional Record, 48th Cong., 2d sess., 505.

  25 “No matter how little”: “The Oklahoma Boomers,” Cherokee Advocate, October 12, 1887.

  26 “most rapid settlement”: Statistical Atlas of the United States (Washington, DC, 1914), 40.

  27 less than one-quarter Indian: Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ, 2017), 167.

  28 “jist plumb” … “furrin country”: Lynn Riggs, Green Grow the Lilacs (New York, 1931), 161.

  29 “I kept”: Phyllis Cole Braunlich, Haunted by Home: The Life and Letters of Lynn Riggs (Norman, OK, 1988), 179.

  3. EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT GUANO BUT WERE AFR AID TO ASK

  1 “dagger pointed”: Lubna Z. Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (Lanham, MD, 2009), 86. The joke is originally Richard Edes Harrison’s.

  2 “power of population”: Thomas Robert Malthus, First Essay on Population (London, 1798), 44.

  3 value of “lost” human feces: George E. Waring, The Elements of Agriculture (New York, 1854), 129, discussed in Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia, 1985), 25.

  4 “The fact is notorious”: “Selections by the Committee: Extracts from Dr. Lee’s Report in N.Y. Legislature,” Sentinel and Witness (Middletown, CT), May 7, 1845.

  5 Davy: Humphry Davy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (London, 1813), lecture 6. On fertilizer, I’ve learned much from Ariel Ron, “Developing the Country: ‘Scientific Agriculture’ and the Roots of the Republican Party” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012).

  6 “double tubular apparatus”: Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood (New York, 1887), 2:85.

  7 What did work: The best accounts of guano are Wines, Fertilizer; Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York, 1994); Edward D. Melillo, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930,” American Historical Review 114 (2012): 1028–60; and Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (New York, 2013).

  8 “beastly smelling-bottle”: “Guano,” Vermont Watchman and State Journal, December 27, 1844.

  9 “the most odious”: Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856, 1740.

  10 Sailors hauling guano: “Beauties of Guano Digging,” New York Herald, May 3, 1845; Skaggs, Guano Rush, 160.

  11 “cheapest, most powerful”: “Guano,” Cleveland Herald, July 19, 1844.

  12 Tall tales: “The Effects of Guano—Munchausen Beaten All Hollow!!!” Weekly Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette, June 27, 1845; “Remarkable Properties of Guano,” The Floridian, September 4, 1847.

  13 “This subject” … “The Senator”: Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856, 1741.

  14 “Peruvian guano”: Millard Fillmore, First Annual Message, December 12, 1850, APP.

  15 “exterminate the hated race”: Dan O’Donnell, “The Lobos Islands: American Imperialism in Peruvian Waters in 1852,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 39 (2008): 45.

  16 “The Peruvian penguin”: London Times, October 6, 1852.

  17 Just a single Peruvian island: Congressional Globe, 33d Cong., 1st sess., 1854, 1194.

  18 “vast deposit” … “verdant glades”: James Fenimore Cooper, The Crater, or, Vulcan’s Peak (New York, 1847), 1:186, 185.

  19 capitalization of $10 million: Skaggs, Guano Rush, 54; federal expenditures in 1850 were $44.8 million according to U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury
on the State of Finances for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1934, 1935, 303.

  20 “at the discretion”: Guano Islands Act, U.S. Code 48 (1856), §1411.

  21 “at liberty”: Rene Bach, “Our Ocean Empire,” Morning Oregonian, July 11, 1897.

  22 “new kind” … “consequences beyond”: Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856, 1699, 1698.

  23 “prospect of dominion,” etc.: Ibid., 1698.

  24 fifty-nine islands … ninety-four guano islands: Skaggs, Guano Rush, 71, 199. These numbers refer to ratified claims. But some claims were vague, and I haven’t been able to confirm that every one corresponded to an actual island.

  25 “Pacific will be ours”: Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (London, 1888), 66.

  26 “little paradise”: Cooper, Crater, 184.

  27 “completely encased”: Gregory Rosenthal, “Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857–1870,” Environmental History, 17 (2012): 764.

  28 sixty-eight of these ships mutinied: Melillo, “First Green Revolution,” 1047.

  29 “The shark and the Kanaka”: “Life on a Guano Island,” Weekly Georgia Telegraph, May 7, 1869.

  30 Navassa: On Navassa, I’ve relied on W. M. Alexander, The Brotherhood of Liberty, or, Our Day in Court (Baltimore, 1891); John Cashman, “‘Slaves Under Our Flag’: The Navassa Island Riot of 1889,” Maryland Historian 24 (1993): 1–21; Skaggs, Guano Rush, chap. 10; and Jennifer C. James, “‘Buried in Guano’: Race, Labor, and Sustainability,” American Literary History 24 (2012): 115–42.

  31 “We have been treated”: “Rescued from Death,” Rocky Mountain News, October 11, 1889.

  32 black butchers: “The Black Butchers,” Galveston Daily News, October 11, 1889.

  33 “appertain”: “The Navassa Murder Cases,” New York Age, April 19, 1890; Christina Duffy Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 779–803.

  34 “unequivocally”: Jones v. United States, 137 U.S. 211 (1890).

  35 “American citizens”: Harrison, quoted in “Sentence Commuted,” Atchison Champion, May 19, 1891.

  36 “a convict establishment”: “The Navassa Prisoners,” New York Age, May 30, 1891.

  37 “It is inexcusable”: Benjamin Harrison, Third Annual Message, December 9, 1891, APP.

  38 four hundred thousand tons: Skaggs, Guano Rush, 153.

  39 By 1914: Cushman, Guano, 155.

  40 Haber: I’ve relied especially on Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Dietrich Stolzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew (Philadelphia, 2004); and Daniel Charles, Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (New York, 2005).

  41 2.4 billion: Smil, Enriching the Earth, 160.

  42 “seldom has the awarding”: Charles, Master Mind, 49.

  43 “What Fritz has gained”: Stolzenberg, Haber, 174.

  44 president of the American Chemical Society: Julius Stieglitz, introduction to Edwin E. Slossen, Creative Chemistry (Garden City, NY, 1919), iii.

  45 protest of her husband’s invention: Morris Goran asserts—and the assertion has often been quoted—that Clara regarded poison gas “not only as a perversion of science but also as a sign of barbarism” and “pleaded with her husband” to forsake it (The Story of Fritz Haber [Norman, OK, 1967], 71). Yet Goran offers documentation for none of this. A far more cautious account is Bretislav Friedrich and Dieter Hoffman, “Clara Haber, nee Immerwahr (1870–1915): Life, Work and Legacy,” Zeitschrift für Allgemeine und Anorganische Chemie 642 (2016): 437–88.

  4. TEDDY ROOSE VELT’S VERY GOOD DAY

  1 Powerful men: A helpful examination of presidential origins is Edward Pessen, The Log Cabin Myth: The Social Backgrounds of the Presidents (New Haven, CT, 1984).

  2 “whitetail” … “Antelope”: WTR, 1:86, 1:403.

  3 “A bear’s brain”: WTR, 1:241.

  4 “manliness, self-reliance”: Quoted in Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992), 37.

  5 surrounded by guns: The event is described in Evan Thomas, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 (New York, 2010), 53–54.

  6 “great deeds”: WTR, 8:xliv.

  7 “statesmen” … “unable to fully appreciate”: WTR, 8:17–18.

  8 “peculiarly revolting”: WTR, 9:58.

  9 “The rude, fierce settler”: WTR, 9:57.

  10 “bloody fighting”: WTR, 1:4.

  11 armed Sioux: WTR, vol. 1, chap. 7 of Ranch Life.

  12 “frontier proper”: WTR, 12:254.

  13 “frontier thesis”: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893, in The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920).

  14 “I think you have”: Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1979), 466.

  15 “The world is nearly”: W. T. Stead, ed., The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 190. On the closure of global frontiers, see Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, CA, 2003), chap. 1.

  16 “like land birds”: Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890; New York, 1957), 72.

  17 “great highway”: Ibid., 22.

  18 tendency of bases: Walter LaFeber, in “A Note on the ‘Mercantilist Imperialism’ of Alfred Thayer Mahan,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (1962): 674–85, points out that Mahan’s calls for empire were strategic, not economic, and did not require annexing large colonies. Yet Mahan’s admiration for the British Empire is clear from Sea Power, as is his understanding that, historically, bases “naturally multiplied and grew until they became colonies” (Mahan 24).

  19 Mahan found his ideas received: David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (New York, 2015), 22, 47–48.

  20 “During the last two days”: Roosevelt to Mahan, May 12, 1890, in Richard W. Turk, The Ambiguous Relationship: Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan (Westport, CT, 1987), 109. There is a question, as in the case of Turner, as to whether Mahan influenced Roosevelt or merely confirmed his existing beliefs.

  21 “I should welcome”: Roosevelt to Francis V. Greene, September 23, 1897, quoted in Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956), 37.

  22 Spain’s grip was slipping: Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 3d ed. (New York, 2006), 120.

  23 “civilized warfare” … “extermination”: William McKinley, Message to Congress, April 11, 1898, APP.

  24 damsel in distress: An astute analysis of gender’s role in the affair is Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and the Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT, 1998).

  25 “I don’t propose”: G.J.A. O’Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic—1898 (New York, 1984), 125.

  26 “Dirty treachery”: Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, 600.

  27 “I have been through”: Hermann Hagedorn, Leonard Wood: A Biography (New York, 1931), 1:141.

  28 “McKinley is bent”: O’Toole, Spanish War, 146.

  29 “a perfect dear”: Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, 566.

  30 “Dewey could be slipped”: WTR, 20:220.

  31 “look after the routine”: Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time (New York, 1920), 1:86.

  32 The Battle of Manila Bay: My account of the war from the perspective of the United States relies on David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York, 1981); O’Toole, Spanish War; and Ivan Musicant, Empire by Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century (New York, 1998).

  33 “Nineteenth century civilization”: Joseph Stickney, War in the Philippine
s: Life and Glorious Deeds of Admiral Dewey (Chicago, 1899), 37.

  34 “That night”: “The Battle of Manila Bay,” The Bounding Billow, June 1898, in Nicholson Scrapbooks.

  35 “Is his wife dead?”: Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, 612.

  36 “the lands that have been”: WTR, 11:11.

  37 “wilder type,” etc.: WTR, 11:17.

  38 “most faithful and loyal”: WTR, 11:40.

  39 Demolins’s book: WTR, 11:32.

  40 battle for the San Juan Heights: See, in addition to the military histories cited above, Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders in WTR, vol. 11, and Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, chap. 25.

  41 “support the regulars”: Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, 654.

  42 “The instant I received”: WTR, 11:81.

  43 “a thin line”: The Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville, VA, 1971), 9:158.

  44 “passing the shouting”: WTR, 11:85.

  45 “bullets were ripping”: WTR, 11:88.

  46 killed a Spaniard: A more skeptical account is Trask, War with Spain, chap. 10.

  47 first documentary battle footage: Bonnie M. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War (Amherst, MA, 2011), 98.

  48 “splendid little war”: John Hay to Roosevelt, July 29, 1898, in William Roscoe Thatcher, The Life and Letters of John Hay (Boston, 1915), 2:337.

  49 “house of cards”: Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (New York, 1902), 5:295.

  50 “We succeeded”: David Starr Jordan, Imperial Democracy (New York, 1899), 91.

  51 Spain had a sizable: Spanish troops: Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898–1923 (Oxford, UK, 1997), 39. U.S. troops: Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War (Columbia, MO, 1971), 5, 136.

  52 a latecomer: This interpretation of the war, as regards Cuba, is advanced brilliantly in Louis A. Pérez Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998). A nearly identical case can be made for the Philippines, and Renato Constantino, A History of the Philippines: From the Spanish Colonization to the Second World War (New York, 1975), chaps. 9–12, supplies the details. On the more limited role Puerto Ricans played in dislodging Spain, see Fernando Picó, Puerto Rico 1898: The War After the War, trans. Sylvia Korwek and Psique Arana Guzmán (1987; Princeton, NJ, 2004).

 

‹ Prev