How to Hide an Empire

by Daniel Immerwahr

  43 longer summit: See December 1944 issue of Industrial Standardization.

  44 “unending stream”: Robert M. Gates, “How British and American Screw Threads Differ,” Industrial Standardization, December 1944, 246.

  45 conference in Ottawa: “‘Inch’ Screw Thread Practice Unified,” February 1946, Industrial Standardization, 36–42.

  46 “beaten the gun”: Case, “Unification of Screw Threads,” 304.

  47 60 percent of the industrialized world’s economic production: Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York, 2015), 15.

  48 “America is our largest”: Quoted in Roger E. Gay, “World Significance of Standardization,” Industrialization, September 1952, 305.

  49 fighter planes … “a British stretcher”: William L. Batt, “Europe Discovers America,” Standardization, January 1953, 8. On NATO, see also Willard L. Thorp, “Standards and International Relations,” in National Standards in a Modern Economy, ed. Dickson Reck (New York, 1956), 343–51.

  50 leading British standards journal: “British Consider U.S. Views,” Standardization, June 1953, 179.

  51 The Third World: The process by which poorer countries adopted the standards of richer ones is described in Lal C. Verman, Standardization: A New Discipline (Hamden, CT, 1973), 166–67, and Lal C. Verman, “India Reports Active Program,” Industrial Standardization, September 1948, 122–24.

  52 “smoothing the flow,” etc.: Truman to George F. Hussey, May 21, 1952, reprinted in “Welcome to ISO from the President of the United States,” Standardization, September 1952, 269.

  53 440 hertz: Bruce Haynes, A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of “A” (Lanham, MD, 2002), 360–61; “What’s the Pitch, Boys?” Standardization, April 1949, 101–102; and Perry, Story of Standards, 120.

  54 “we now think in terms”: H. E. Hilts, “International Signs for the World’s Traffic,” Standardization, August 1953, 239.

  55 yellow octagon: Clay McShane, “The Origins and Globalization of Traffic Control Signals,” Journal of Urban History 25 (1999): 382; H. Gene Hawkins Jr., “Evolution of the MUTCD: Early Standards for Traffic Control Devices,” ITE Journal, July 1992, 24.

  56 changed its mind: H. Gene Hawkins Jr., “Evolution of the MUTCD: The MUTCD Since World War II,” ITE Journal, November 1992, 18.

  57 56 percent of mainlanders: John Bemelmans Marciano, Whatever Happened to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet (New York, 2014), 243. Awareness rose in the 1970s as the federal government moved to convert to metric, but that conversion was never complete.

  58 sole holdouts against: Vera, “Social Life of Measures,” 60–61. Palau, the FSM, and the RMI were formerly part of the United States’ strategic trust territory in Micronesia.

  59 convened a grand meeting: Some background on the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals is in E. W. Foell, “Traffic Signs Baffling the World Over,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1970.

  60 91 percent of the world’s population: Thanks to the intrepid Callie Leone for help in producing this figure.

  61 “domination without”: George Marion, Bases and Empire: A Chart of American Expansion (New York, 1948), chap. 12.

  62 great coordinating process: A point developed cogently in Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, CA, 2003).

  63 “flat”: Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005).

  19. LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS

  1 “broken English”: William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606–1646, ed. William T. Davis (1651; New York, 1908), 135. On Squanto, I’ve relied on Neil Salisbury, “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets,” in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley, CA, 1981), 228–46.

  2 “special instrument”: Bradford, History, 111.

  3 polyglot crazy quilt: On eighteenth-century language, I’ve used Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Others Characters in the Newly United States (New York, 2002); Marc Shell, ed., American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni (Cambridge, MA, 2002); and Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire,” in Formations of United States Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein (Durham, NC, 2014), 335–60.

  4 tongues cut out: Marc Shell, “Babel in America,” in American Babel, 4.

  5 traces of African idioms: African survivals are most discernible in Gullah, spoken to this day on the Sea Islands and the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. But Gullah is a creole based on English, not an African language.

  6 “We shall break up”: Richard Henry Pratt, quoted in Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln, NE, 2009), 27.

  7 Students caught speaking: Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln, NE, 1988), 28.

  8 bribes, threats, etc.: Practices described in Jacobs, White Mother, chap. 4.

  9 “They beat”: Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, “Technical, Emotional, and Ideological Issues in Reversing Language Shift: Examples from Southeast Alaska,” in Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response, ed. Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 65.

  10 Chamoru: Sharleen J. Q. Santos-Bamba, “The Literate Lives of Chamorro Women in Modern Guam” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2010), chap. 5.

  11 Chamoru dictionaries: Jack Fahy, special assistant to the secretary, “Preliminary Report of Naval Administration of Island Possessions,” April 15, 1945, 8; “Pacific Planning” folder; box 156; R-0-40, Administrative, World War; Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907–1951; ROT.

  12 Virgin Islands: William W. Boyer, America’s Virgin Islands: A History of Human Rights and Wrongs (Durham, NC, 1983), 182.

  13 “cardinal point”: Fred Atkinson, quoted in Funie Hsu, “Colonial Articulations: English Instruction and the ‘Benevolence’ of U.S. Overseas Expansion in the Philippines, 1898–1916” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013), 20.

  14 “I am astounded,” etc.: Speech, December 20, 1947, recorded in Jack West, report on Albizu, May 4, 1948, 34–35, Albizu FBI File, section 5, box 2.

  15 “by teachers”: Ford Report, 1913, quoted in Cristina Evangelista Torres, The Americanization of Manila, 1898–1921 (Quezon City, 2010), 154. On this, see also Vicente L. Rafael’s insightful Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (Durham, NC, 2016).

  16 former governor: Origins of the Philippine Republic: Extracts from the Diaries and Records of Francis Burton Harrison, ed. Michael P. Onorato (Ithaca, NY, 1974), 117.

  17 “with a left-handed”: Robert H. Gore, quoted in Thomas Mathews, Puerto Rican Politics and the New Deal (Gainesville, FL, 1960), 64.

  18 Teachers there: Solsiree del Moral, Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of the Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952 (Madison, WI, 2013), 16.

  19 roughly a quarter: 27.8 percent in Puerto Rico, 26.6 percent in the Philippines. Amílcar Antonio Barreto, The Politics of Language in Puerto Rico (Gainesville, FL, 2001), 21; Andrew B. Gonzalez, Language and Nationalism: The Philippine Experience Thus Far (Quezon City, 1980), 26.

  20 polyglot pidgin: John E. Reinecke, “‘Pidgin English’ in Hawaii: A Local Study of the Sociology of Language,” American Journal of Sociology 5 (1938): 778–89.

  21 scientific conferences: Michael D. Gordin, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (Chicago, 2015), 180.

  22 Woodrow Wilson: Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, MD, 2005), 34.

  23 tried to learn Osage: Louise Morse Whitham, “Herbert Hoover and the Osages,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 25 (1947): 3.

  24 used Mandari
n: Herbert Hoover, Memoirs (New York, 1951), 1:36.

  25 “It was then,” etc.: Mario Pei, One Language for the World (New York, 1958), 31–32.

  26 “The empires of the future,” etc.: “Anglo-American Unity,” September 6, 1943, in Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James (New York, 1974), 7:6826.

  27 “underhanded orthography”: Gordin, Scientific Babel, 205.

  28 Basic’s champions: W. Terrence Gordon, “C. K. Ogden’s Basic English,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 45 (1988): 339.

  29 “In Basic”: Alok Rai, Orwell and the Politics of Despair: A Critical Study of the Writings of George Orwell (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 125–26.

  30 “spread like wildfire,” etc.: H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (New York, 1934), 417.

  31 “The majority of Chinese,” etc.: I. A. Richards, Basic in Teaching: East and West (London, 1935), 45.

  32 Chinese government to agree: Rodney Koeneke, Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979 (Stanford, CA, 2004), 5.

  33 “It takes only”: “Globalingo,” Time, December 31, 1945, 48.

  34 “has tremendous merit”: FDR to Cordell Hull, June 5, 1944, FDR Library, docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/t335k03.html.

  35 “blood, work” … “Seriously”: FDR to Churchill, June 1944, FDR Library, docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/a335k01.html.

  36 “The Koreans”: Chad Walsh, “Basic English: World Language or World Philosophy,” College English 6 (1945): 456.

  37 dozens of schemes: Pei, One Language, 119; Edmund Vincent Starrett, “Spelling Reform Proposals for the English Language” (Ed.D. diss., Wayne State University, 1981).

  38 Owen: Narcissa Owen, A Cherokee Woman’s America: Memoirs of Narcissa Owen, 1831–1907 (Gainesville, FL, 2005), 97.

  39 On December 7/8, 1941: Global Alphabet: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 79th Cong., 1st sess., November 7, 1945 (Washington, DC, 1945), 6.

  40 “by which we can”: “Former Senator Owen Devises Global Alphabet,” New York Herald Tribune, July 29, 1943.

  41 “the conversational language” … compatible with Basic: Global Alphabet, 65, 4.

  42 FDR passed the scheme: Ibid., 48.

  43 “I do not think”: Carl Hatch, quoted in ibid., 11.

  44 Shaw: Starrett, “Spelling Reform,” 260–61.

  45 Eleanor Roosevelt: Mario Pei, The Story of English (Philadelphia, 1952), 314.

  46 special typewriter: “Appeal for Global Alphabet Made,” Baltimore Evening Sun, December 18, 1946.

  47 “sign of slavery”: M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (New York, 2009), 102.

  48 “psychological violence” … mission school: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London, 1986), 9, 11.

  49 “When I travel” … “Did you ever” … “a language” … “a national soul”: Quezon, speech, November 7, 1937, in The Great Quezon’s Dream: A National Language for the Filipinos , 4–5, typescript, in AHC. Language in the Philippines is best approached through Rafael, Motherless Tongues.

  50 Basic Tagalog: “Eureka! Basic Tagalog!” Manila Evening News, January 17, 1946.

  51 “decadent” subject: Pei, Story of English, 347.

  52 “only provisionally”: Quoted in Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford, UK, 1992), 27.

  53 “wreck all hopes”: Quoted in ibid., 167.

  54 some linguists have insisted: The argument is made best in Phillipson’s Linguistic Imperialism and Diana Lemberg, “‘The Universal Language of the Future’: Decolonization, Development, and the American Embrace of Global English, 1945–1965,” Modern Intellectual History 15 (2018): 561–592.

  55 foreign students: Paul A. Kramer, “Is the World Our Campus?: International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” DH 33 (2009): 792.

  56 forty U.S. government agencies: Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism, 157.

  57 instrument of “Western psychological”: Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York, 1965), 248.

  58 “Special English”: Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language (New York, 2009), 141–42.

  59 priority on language export: Phillipson’s interviews with governmental officials clarify this. See Linguistic Imperialism, 310.

  60 It wasn’t until 1965: National Security Action Memorandum 332, 1965, discussed in Lemberg, “Universal Language,” 587.

  61 from the bottom up: See especially David Crystal, English as a Global Language, 2d ed. (New York, 2003), and David Northrup, How English Became the Global Language (New York, 2013).

  62 quarter of the population: 26.1 percent speaking English by 1950: Barreto, Politics of Language, 21.

  63 compulsion rarely comes from: The case is made cogently in David Singh Grewal, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization (New Haven, CT, 2008).

  64 “Speaking frankly,” etc.: Masaaki Morita, quoted in Genryu, the 50th-anniversary history of Sony, translated and abbreviated at sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory.

  65 Gromyko: Pei, One Language, 51.

  66 70 percent of the world’s passenger miles: Jenifer Van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 170.

  67 Francophones in Quebec: Sandford F. Borins, The Language of the Skies: The Bilingual Air Traffic Control Conflict in Canada (Montreal, 1983). Three years after the strike, the government relented and allowed French to be used in limited circumstances.

  68 scientists: My account of science—both its pursuit of international languages and its succumbing to English—is derived from Gordin, Scientific Babel.

  69 Nobel Prizes: Counting prizes in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine and using laureate biographies from www.nobelprize.org.

  70 half of publications: Ulrich Ammon, “Linguistic Inequality and Its Effects on Participation in Scientific Discourse and on Global Knowledge Accumulation,” Applied Linguistics Review 3 (2012): 338.

  71 well over 90 percent: Ibid.

  72 Hebrew University’s: I counted refereed papers or those intended for peer review on faculty websites linked at www.phys.huji.ac.il/people_faculty, accessed May 30, 2017.

  73 82.3 percent of randomly chosen websites: David Crystal, Language and the Internet (New York, 2001), 217.

  74 ASCII: Daniel Pargman and Jacob Palme, “ASCII Imperialism,” in Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, ed. Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star (Ithaca, NY, 2009), 177–99.

  75 QWERTY: The long shadow cast by that English-language typewriter over global information processing is discussed brilliantly in Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA, 2017).

  76 “It is the ultimate act,” etc.: Crystal, Global Language, 117.

  77 “a major risk”: Quoted in “The Coming Global Tongue,” The Economist, December 21, 1996, 75.

  78 60 percent of the world’s radio: Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (New York, 2000), 18.

  79 language of Esperanto: Mario Pei, Wanted: A World Language (New York, 1969).

  80 “bitter truth,” etc.: Manu Joseph, “India Faces a Linguistic Truth: English Spoken Here,” NYT, February 16, 2011. On the general trend, see Joshua A. Fishman, Andrew W. Conrad, and Alma Rubal-Lopez, eds., Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940–1990 (Berlin, 1996).

  81 “Investors will not”: Goh Chok Tong, quoted in Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew, Emergent Lingua Francas and World Orders: The Politics and Place of English as a World Language (New York, 2009), 141.

  82 call-center workers: Funie Hsu, “The Coloniality of Neoliberal English: The Enduring S
tructures of American Colonial English Instruction in the Philippines and Puerto Rico,” L2 Journal 7 (2015): 124, 139–40.

  83 Mongolia: Nicholas Ostler, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (New York, 2010), 15.

  84 hundred thousand native speakers: Daniel Goodard, “Teaching English Abroad Is an Increasingly Popular Choice for Struggling Undergraduates,” The Independent, November 19, 2012.

  85 “If the Chinese”: John McWhorter, “Where Do Languages Go to Die?” The Atlantic, September 10, 2015, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/aramaic-middle-east-language/404434/.

  86 language with the most native speakers: Language rankings from “Summary by Language Size,” Ethnologue, www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size. For the limits of English, see Barbara Wallraff, “What Global Language?” Atlantic Monthly, November 2000, 52–66.

  87 roughly one in four: Crystal, Global Language, 69.

  88 study commissioned by the British Council: Robert Pinon and John Haydon, The Benefits of English Language for Individuals and Societies: Quantitative Indicators from Cameroon, Nigeria, Rwanda, Bangladesh, and Pakistan (London, 2010), 11.

  89 lingual frenectomies … “English is now”: Kathy Marks, “Seoul Tries to Shock Parents out of Linguistic Surgery,” The Independent, January 3, 2004.

  90 Modern Language Association: David Goldberg, Dennis Looney, and Natalia Lusin, “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education,” 26, Modern Language Association, February 2015, apps.mla.org/pdf/2013_enrollment_survey.pdf.

  91 “It’s embarrassing”: Maria Gavrilovic, “Obama: ‘I Don’t Speak a Foreign Language. It’s Embarrassing!’” CBS News, July 11, 2008, cbsnews.com.

  20. POWER IS SOVEREIGNTY, MISTER BOND

  1 Rumors floated: Ivar Bryce, You Only Live Once: Memories of Ian Fleming (London, 1975), 68. On Fleming, see also Matthew Parker, Goldeneye, Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica (New York, 2015).

  2 “ behind the curtains”: Stanley Ross, Axel Wenner-Gren: The Sphinx of Sweden (New York, 1947), 1. A more sober account is Ilja A. Luciak, “Vision and Reality: Axel Wenner-Gren, Paul Fejos, and the Origins of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,” Current Anthropology 57 (2016): S302–S332.