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Almost everything you know about U.S. borders is wrong - “How to Hide an Empire” by Daniel Immerwahr sounds like a very interesting book.
Sounds like “How to Hide an Empire” by Daniel Immerwahr us a very interesting book.
I have heard about some of this in the past, but I had no idea it was this bad.
I knew that the American territories or American colonies of the Philippines, Wake Island and Guam were invaded by Japan in World War II, but I had no idea it happened within hours of the Pearl Harbor bombing in Hawaii.
Nor did I have any idea that the American people were against using American soldiers to defend these colonies.
I also know that the American Empire acquired those colonies when we invaded the Spanish Empire during the Spanish American War and conquered and stole Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain and turned them into American colonies.
Kinda like when we invaded Mexico in the Mexican American War and stole half of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and parts of Nevada and Colorado from Mexico. We first turned that stolen property into territories and later into American states.
Sadly the history books on wars and government are written by the government so they rarely if ever document all the lies and government tyranny.
Almost everything you know about U.S. borders is wrong
Christopher Borrelli
Chicago Tribune
Daniel Immerwahr is not an outwardly provocative guy. He is slender and mild, from suburban Philadelphia, comes off serious, but not arrogant, smartly appointed, but not flashy. His office in the history department at Northwestern University is standard issue, rectangular, lined with books, a few personal artifacts, but nothing striking. He has a tattoo on his right arm of the Charles Demuth painting “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold.” Otherwise: a casting director’s dream of a young, unpretentious history professor.
But there are different ways to be a history professor, he says, waving a hand as if to introduce each. “There are different modes. One is outrage — the tragic history of what modernity has wrought. Some go for antiquarian — ‘How different and weird the past was!’ But the feeling I most prize as a historian is ‘Holy (expletive)! I didn’t know that!’”
Take “How to Hide an Empire,” his new book.
At a glance, it looks like a dive into the history of American territorial (yawn) expansion. And it is, a deeply researched, often revelatory reframing of history as seen through the islands, prairies and military bases that the United States has claimed as its own. It is about how “mainland” Americans came to regard — or perhaps, disregard — places like Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, along with the U.S. citizens in those territories. It is about, as Immerwahr describes, the nation as a “pointillist empire.”
And yet, even if you set aside that premise, as much as this is a story of neglect and violence — it’s an absorbing, entertaining read. You learn something amazing on almost every page. Did you know American expansion (through military bases in England) helped create the Beatles? Or the role that “Peruvian guano lords” played in U.S. history? Or that Hoover was obsessed with standardizing screws?
Or that Godzilla is really an American creation?
Or that each of these seemingly disparate facts, in a way, are linked? Immerwahr is not the conspiratorial sort of history professor, and yet it’s not hard picturing him before one of those large blackboards on “The Wire,” drawing a spiderweb of connections and relationships. He laughs at this. “Actually, as I was working on a draft,” he said, “I seriously sent my agent a note: ‘Godzilla, the peace sign, 9/11, military bases ...’ then in all caps with like eight exclamation points, ‘IT’S ALL CONNECTED!!!!!!!!’ That was exactly the feeling I was getting, that feeling of strange and obscure details suddenly revealed to be important.”
“How to Hide an Empire” builds towards a single, reality-scrambling concept: that the familiar map of the United States you know, sea to shining sea, Atlantic to Pacific, Canada to Mexico, is wrong. This, in other words, is a different argument about borders. We spoke recently at Northwestern. The following is an edited version of a longer conversation.
Q: Why start with Pearl Harbor ?
A: What is familiarly remembered as Pearl Harbor is in fact an empire-wide attack by Japan on the United States’ Pacific holdings. In a matter of hours, Japan attacks the Philippines, Hawaii, Wake Island and Guam, but it’s remembered as an attack on Hawaii. There is an amazing moment later where Nixon, who fought in the Pacific, is talking about Hawaii and says it’s the only U.S. territory struck during World War II. And he served there. That kind of memory is forged in the day or two after the attack when you see drafts of FDR’s speech and he’s trying to figure out how to narrate this event. Militarily the damage done in the Philippines is arguably just as bad or worse than Hawaii. Just after the invasion and bombing, Eleanor Roosevelt describes the attack as a bombing of Hawaii and the Philippines. His secretary of state narrates it this way. In the end, the Philippines is conquered, one million people die there — that’s just Philippine numbers. It’s the bloodiest event to ever take place on U.S. soil. But (in the days after the initial 1941 attack), the Philippines is crossed out of speeches, presumably because of a sense it is insufficiently domestic. Places with more white people sold better as “the United States.” There’s also the question of what the public backs. In polls right before Pearl Harbor, the public is asked if it supports a military defense of the Philippines.
Q: And they say no.
A: Exactly — about 55 percent of the mainland public is even unwilling to see a military defense of Hawaii.
Q: So why does the U.S. use Hawaii as the central narrative to rally support?
A: It had a much larger white population (than the Philippines). It’s more receptive to settlement. It’s not a state yet but incorporated territory, so potentially admissible to statehood, whereas the Philippines is unincorporated and under U.S. law, as a Supreme Court justice notoriously put it, it is “foreign in a domestic sense.” But even Hawaii was tricky for FDR because of polls. Rand McNally’s atlas still listed Hawaii as foreign land.
Q: You write about an incident between Kalamazoo schoolchildren and Rand McNally, on this point.
A: Right, these seventh-grade girls there, they write to Rand McNally asking, “How can you list Hawaii as foreign when we’re fighting a war because the U.S. was hit at Hawaii?” Rand McNally responds — and this is so rich — that ‘although Hawaii belongs to the United States it is not an integral part of this country. It is foreign to our continental shores and therefore cannot be logically shown under the United States proper.” The girls respond that it’s an alibi rather than an explanation. And they’re right.
Q: Why the unwillingness from Americans to place U.S. territories in the national imagination?
A: A lot of reasons. But I think the U.S. showed an unusual form of commitment to a form of empire that involves continuous expansion and demographic swamping — basically, pushing indigenous people aside as settlers from the East Coast pushed west. That experience imprinted on the national mythology. Yes, it has territories but some get to be states and, according to the Northwest Ordinance, the way for territories to become states is to fill up with white people once indigenous people are displaced. That is the model for much of the 19th century and it proves a hard idea to break. A big part of the story the United States tells about itself is that it’s exceptional, it doesn’t impose itself on countries, it is not imperial. Compare that to Britain. For a long time they’re quite proud of the idea they are civilizing the world through empire.
Q: They describe themselves as an empire.
A: They even created a holiday called Empire Day. Around the same time, the United States begins a holiday called Flag Day, which is about venerating a flag that includes the stars for every state but nothing at all for its territories.
Q: What is a difference between territory and commonwealth?
A: There are legal distinctions, but really “territory” covers it all. Puerto Rico is a territory but its legal designation is commonwealth. Commonwealth status intends to suggest an in-between status, between colony and independent country. It implies that some powers will be locally controlled apart from the mainland (government). “Colony,” though, is interesting. At the moment when a lot of U.S. territories were acquired Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were happy to openly refer to them as colonies. Because that’s what they were. But within a decade or so, euphemism sets in and the government gets uncomfortable with the C-word and starts calling them territories. Which is comfortable because “territory” encompasses places like Kansas and Montana, and again, a history of territories becoming states, therefore a part of our mythology that doesn’t challenge the idea that the U.S. is a republic, not an empire.
Q: What about “focus group”? Cornelius Rhoads turns Puerto Rico into a focus group.
A: Or a laboratory. He views it that way. He’s this Harvard-trained guy hired by the Rockefeller Foundation who goes to Puerto Rico to study the effect of hookworm disease on anemia. Because he’s in Puerto Rico, not Cambridge, he feels he has a license to run all kinds of experiments, including depriving some patients of treatment and inducing anemia in others. He refers to Puerto Ricans as “experimental animals.” He composes a letter in which he says Puerto Rico is beautiful but its population is objectionable and the best thing would be to exterminate Puerto Ricans. He says he started by killing eight patients and seeks to transplant cancer in 13 more. Then that letter is discovered and becomes a scandal. He claims he was angry and drunk when he wrote it. There is a (U.S.) investigation. But he faces no charges and is never questioned by the government — which later discovers an even worse letter, then destroys the evidence.
Q: Do you see consistency between that history and criticism of how negligent the U.S. federal government was toward Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017? Speaking of which, there was a massive typhoon last fall in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, 180 mph winds, that many here never heard about.
A: Typhoon Yutu. The worst storm to hit the United States since the 1930s, did irreparable damage. And it barely made a bent on the mainland conscience. I could find almost no reporting on it. But let’s just do the math: Hurricane Maria hits Puerto Rico, Hurricane Irma hits the U.S. Virgin Islands just before that, Typhoon Yutu hit Northern Mariana a few months ago. Also in 2017, North Korea threatens to fire missiles at Guam. There are five inhabited U.S. territories now and four were facing existential threats. (American Samoa is the fifth.) That’s the front lines of history, but the mainland tends to be fairly unaware of what is going on with them, which fuels a federal neglect.
Q: Did the U.S. always intend to expand beyond the East Coast of North America?
A: Well, the borders were nebulous from the get go. The United States needed to grow to a degree to firm up its place among empires — to give it some heft. A lot of the founders speak eagerly about expansion, but it wasn’t clear how fast that would happen or in what direction. Jefferson is most interested in the Caribbean. He’s eyeing Cuba. But the notion that the U.S. had to push west? That was far from obvious at the founding.
Q: How many people live in its territories today?
A: The number is changing, partly because of depopulation in Puerto Rico. But about four million. It’s a lot of people.
Q: Is this a radical approach to American history?
A: No, not very. A lot of historians have studied U.S. territories and military bases for a long while. What I’ve been frustrated by is that despite shelves of research, many U.S. historians still haven’t done a great job of absorbing that knowledge. Take the Journal of American History, the major U.S. history journal among American historians. In the last 50 years, aside from book reviews, it has published only one article about the Philippines — one! I can’t imagine British historians being so cavalier about India. So no, this book is not really radical. This is not new information. And yet, yeah, a lot of historians of the United States, for a long time, have found it easy to ignore places that are the United States. That attitude is what I hope this book can change.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @Borrelli