Hiding an empire in plain sight
A historian charts the complex history of U.S. Territories
In Daniel Immerwahr’s “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the United States,” he includes a draft of FDR’s “Infamy” speech on page five. The draft is littered with inky rewrites, and to Mr. Immerwahr, the most notable edit concerns the line “Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in Hawaii and the Philippines.” Roosevelt faced a problem in this sentence: If he highlighted the Philippines, would Americans truly feel that “America” had been attacked? Would they rally to war?
On the draft, you can see Roosevelt bet on the geographical ignorance of his constituents. He crosses out “Hawaii and the Philippines” and writes “Oahu.” In the words of Immerwahr, “If the Philippines was being rounded down to foreign, Hawaii was being rounded up to ‘American.’”
This early “Infamy” anecdote provides something of a thesis for Immerwahr, who argues that short-term political goals have created long-term chaos when it comes to American territories. The draft of Roosevelt’s speech notwithstanding, his approach is not “archival” but “perspectival.”
“Once you look beyond the logo map,” he writes of the common continental rendering of the U.S., “you see a whole new set of struggles over what it means to inhabit the United States.” His goal is to take readers on a historical tour of the country’s many territorial entanglements until the phrase “United States” becomes a grossly inaccurate term.
It’s a fun tour. Immerwahr recasts popularized figures such as Daniel Boone, Douglas MacArthur and Mark Twain as central if sometimes unwitting players in the debate over American expansionism. He also manages to reframe everything from James Bond movies to the Beatles as crucially relevant in matters of empire and globalization.
But whereas the pop culture anecdotes are few, the ramifications of expansionism are many. When it comes to the nation’s insistence of the primacy of the English language, Immerwahr notes that “slave owners made a point of separating African slaves who spoke the same language,” even slicing out their tongues.
Alaskan school children had their native Tlingit literally beaten out of them. Although there’s debate about the degree to which America fits the definition of an empire, “clearly this is not a country that has kept its hands to itself.” Immerwahr laments that “the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.”
Even if you’re inclined to believe that American expansionism is a matter of divine instruction, Immerwahr is particularly convincing when criticizing God’s playcalling. When it comes to U.S. territories, the only thing more consistent than violence is ineptitude.
Immerwahr notes that FDR’s first governor of Puerto Rico “spoke no Spanish and left reporters with the distinct impression that he didn’t know where the island was.” For months, Alaska “didn’t have a single federal official in it.” Officials in the book are analogized not to great heroes of the past but to bumbling counterparts across the globe: “Like MacArthur in the Philippines, [Ernest] Gruening begged for help. He needed it badly.”
I mock these men from a compromised position. I was embarrassed by how little I knew about each territory. I felt both shock and a weird shame to discover that, after World War II, there were 135 million people in U.S. jurisdictions and 132 million in the mainland. It was during this era, Immerwahr argues, that the U.S. slowly decolonized as it “substituted technology for territory,” standardizing everything from screw threads to stop signs (“91 percent of the world’s population stops at red octagons. Even North Koreans”). Via radio, cryptography, dehydrated food and penicillin, the U.S. sprinted ahead of the world. The only way to keep up was to swallow the trail of cultural bread crumbs it left behind.
But as Immerwahr wisely notes, a head start loses value over time. U.S. innovations are now boomeranging to the mainland in tragic if familiar ways. Whereas CIAbacked radio broadcasts once traveled into the USSR to incite dissent, Russian bots have reversed the flow of misinformation.
Drones have enabled the U.S. to discard empire’s “paint roller” so that it may instead wield “the pointillist’s brush,” and this targeted, largely troopless military approach was rather easily adopted by Osama bin Laden, who could “make air strikes without an air force.”
Throw in “birtherism” about a Hawaiian president, an Alaskan vice presidential candidate, and, by the end of Daniel Immerwahr’s book, the story of the U.S. territories feels both overlooked and crucial when it comes to understanding our supposedly indivisible nation.