Rambling

Book Thoughts: How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr

This book is focused on illuminating the U.S.'s empire across its history, going from what Immerwahr calls the Colonialist Empire to the Pointillist Empire. Basically, over time, the U.S. has decided it doesn't need to control much land because technology has improved to let them control things from a series of points, AKA our 800 military bases overseas.

Puerto Rico might be more visible in the average American's knowledge now (one hopes), but what about how entangled the U.S. was in the Philippines, to the point that it was actually on the maps in the 1900s? What about the fact that Alaska and Hawai'i didn't become states until after WWII, and they were legitimately just seen as colonies? And all of the failed proposed states because the U.S. was too racist to consider letting in any territory that was majority people of color? And what about all the islands, a total of like 4 million people, that don't have any representation now, where basically the military gets to rule?

Given its scope, this book is focused on the concept of territory; it's basically about military and its atrocities. And yet, there's a lot of other stuff missing because the list of U.S. crimes (such as every coup attempted by the CIA) are too long to even really cover. Nearly every historical figure in this book mentioned is a man because of this.

The book is easier to read than a completely dry history textbook because it starts every section with talking about a work or a person that sets the scene for the actual history part. This is a really useful technique that I don't think I appreciated when I was younger (since I was only trying to look for facts), because it helps you remember where things are placed a little bit better. That said, I would have appreciated a timeline of all of the events mentioned in this book at the end because the narrative loops back and forth.


Main thoughts I have from all of this is:

Also I think Immerwahr's favorite historical figure (because he's neglected) is Albizu and it's like his mission to get this guy into history textbooks.


Below are some basic notes I took throughout the book.

The Greater United States map The Greater United States, 1941: (Top row, from left) Alaska, the mainland; (middle row) Guam, American Samoa, the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands; (bottom row, and not to scale) the Pacific outlying islands (left) and the Caribbean outlying islands (right)

From the day the treaty securing independence from Britain was ratified, right up to the present, it’s been a collection of states and territories. It’s been a partitioned country, divided into two sections, with different laws applying in each.

What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to U.S. history than is usually supposed. It hasn’t just been about black and white, but about Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Chamoru (from Guam), too, among other identities. Race has not only shaped lives, it’s shaped the country itself—where the borders went, who has counted as “American.”

Ten-peso Philippine Islands money

"Philippine Islands, U.S.A.: A ten-peso note. Throughout the territories, colonized subjects were obliged to use bills with the faces of U.S. leaders on them. Extraordinarily, this Philippine bill was the basis for the design of the familiar U.S. dollar, not the other way around."

Besides Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and a handful of minor outlying islands, the United States maintains roughly eight hundred overseas military bases around the world.

Indigenous displacement map
Map of forcing indigenous groups into Oklahoma

guano island map U.S. guano island claims, 1857–1902

Greater United States map 1900
The Greater United States: Maps like this, taken from the inside cover of a 1900 history textbook, appeared frequently starting in 1899, often as the principal maps of the United States. Shown, along with the states, are a much-diminished Indian Country, as well as Hawai‘i, Guam, Wake, American Samoa, the Philippines, Alaska, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.


The fantasy of conquest is always the same: defeat the leader and the country is yours. The United States had learned the folly of this when it won the Philippines from Spain, only to find itself fighting the Philippine Army. It was about to learn the lesson again.

Every one of the army’s first twelve chiefs of staff, in fact, served in the Philippine War. Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought.

violating human life & making concentration camps gets you a high position in the military. ugh

The ploy was used repeatedly, in country after country around the Caribbean. The United States seized the levers of finance and trade but left sovereignty formally intact. “Dollar diplomacy” was the polite name for this, though “gunboat diplomacy” was the more accurate euphemism. To ensure political and financial “stability,” U.S. troops entered Cuba (four times), Nicaragua (three times), Honduras (seven times), the Dominican Republic (four times), Guatemala, Panama (six times), Costa Rica, Mexico (three times), and Haiti (twice) between 1903 and 1934. The United States helped to put down revolts, replaced governments when necessary, and offered battleships-in-the-harbor “advice” to others. But the only territory it annexed in that period was the U.S. Virgin Islands, peacefully purchased from Denmark in 1917.

Such animosity meant little to U.S. leaders at the time—they didn’t have much business in places like Egypt and Korea. But later it would come to mean a great deal. The Chinese protester complaining of “robbers” in Paris—that was a young Mao Zedong. Nguyen the Patriot also gained renown, although by another name: Ho Chi Minh. That Egyptian boy reciting poems and making speeches was Sayyid Qutb, a leading Islamist thinker who would become the key inspiration for Osama bin Laden. And Albizu? Pedro Albizu Campos would become the most dangerous domestic anti-imperialist the United States would ever face.

Of the more than twenty thousand trials conducted in one of Honolulu’s provost courts in 1942, 98.4 percent resulted in guilty verdicts. The tens of thousands of defendants who passed through Hawai‘i’s provost courts were not charged with the usual: robbery, assault, fraud, etc. They were tried for failing to show up to work, for breaking curfew, and for committing traffic violations, mainly." most of these sentences could be paid off. Martial law ended after 3 years due to legal challenges by mainlanders

In the month of fighting, 1,010 of [American soldiers] died. Compare that with the 16,665 Japanese troops who perished. And compare that with the 100,000 Manilans killed. For every “American life” lost, 100 Manilans died.

Or so we think. As usual, mainland lives lost were counted with to-the-last-digit precision, while Filipino fatality numbers were at best informed guesses. The 100,000 estimate, accepted by the U.S. Army, was extrapolated from figures submitted by undertakers after the war.

Senator Millard Tydings surveyed the colony after the war. He estimated that 10 to 15 percent of its buildings had been destroyed, and another 10 percent damaged. After the war, Filipinos submitted claims to the government on behalf of 1,111,938 war deaths. Add Japanese (518,000) and mainlander fatalities (the army counted slightly more than 10,000) and the total climbs to more than 1.6 million.

Think of a GI, and you’re more likely to imagine a soldier on the front lines than a construction worker. But in the case of the United States, the construction worker is the better mental image. During the war, fewer than one in ten U.S. service members ever saw a shot fired in anger. For most who served, the war wasn’t about combat. It was about logistics.

Polar azimuthal projection Richard Edes Harrison’s polar azimuthal projection, first published by Fortune in July 1941 and copied widely thereafter (this is a 1942 version). The original accompanying text explained how “the entire conflict pivots around the U.S.” Arrows extending out from New York and San Francisco show the global flow of lend-lease aid.


When Japanese politicians failed to write a constitution to MacArthur’s satisfaction, he had one drafted, in English, in nine days.

But though it borrowed from the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, the Japanese constitution was far more liberal, the result of a sort of unchecked New Deal that occupation authorities imposed on the country. The new constitution banned war, prohibited racial discrimination, guaranteed academic freedom, forbade torture, and granted all citizens the right to the “minimum standards of wholesome and cultured living.

Somehow, in the anything-goes atmosphere of the occupation, a twenty-two-year-old Jewish woman named Beate Sirota had made it onto the constitutional drafting committee (she had spent part of her childhood in Tokyo and was one of the few whites who spoke Japanese fluently). It was largely owing to her influence that the constitution mandated equal rights within marriage and prohibited sex discrimination—things that the U.S. constitution conspicuously does not do.

That is still Japan’s constitution today. In more than sixty years, it hasn’t been amended once."

In 1940 its colonized population had made up about 13 percent of the Greater United States. Now, adding it all up—the colonies and occupations—yielded a much larger total. The overseas area under U.S. jurisdiction contained some 135 million people. That was, remarkably, more than the 132 million who inhabited the mainland.

Yet even as leaders sought to brush the uprising under the rug, they capitulated to its demands. The men went home, shrinking the army from more than 8 million troops in May 1945 to fewer than 1 million by the end of June 1947—far short of the 2.5 million men the War Department had called for. The army had become, as one official wrote, “a clock running down, losing time, a mechanism without power.

Enough men stayed abroad to occupy Japan and parts of Germany and Austria. But the Korean occupation, which Roosevelt had predicted would last forty years, lasted only three. Truman lamented that “our influence throughout the world, as well as China, waned as the millions of American soldiers were processed through the discharge centers.

That was an exaggeration. The United States still had more ships, planes, and bases than anyone else. But its peacetime army was only the sixth largest in the world. It was in no position to colonize the planet.


The U.S. Virgin Islands received its first black governor in 1946 and its first native governor in 1950. Guamanians won citizenship and a civil government in 1950, after decades of advocacy. American Samoans remained “nationals” rather than citizens, but they, too, saw naval rule replaced with government by civilians, in 1951.


For racists, this spelled catastrophe—“the beginning of the end of the United States as we have known it,” as Nicholas Murray Butler had put it. In a way, Butler’s prediction turned out to be right. Alaska sent to the Senate Ernest Gruening, who had made a decades-long career of opposing racism and imperialism. In 1964 Gruening achieved national fame as one of only two congressmen—out of 506 voting—to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that led to the direct U.S. entry into the Vietnam War. Hawai‘i, for its part, immediately elected nonwhite congressmen: Hiram Fong to the Senate and Daniel Inouye, veteran of the fabled 442nd Infantry Regiment, to the House. Fong was the first Chinese American to serve in the Senate, Inouye the first Japanese American to serve in Congress. Inouye held congressional office in an unbroken stretch from Hawaiian statehood in 1959 until his death in 2012, surpassing even Strom Thurmond’s forty-seven-year record of longevity. By the time he died, Inouye was president pro tempore of the Senate, which put him third in the line of succession to the presidency.

Fong and Inouye proved to be, just as white supremacists feared, champions of civil rights. And had the segregationists gazed farther into the future, they would have been still more troubled by something else taking place in Hawai‘i at the time.

Nineteen fifty-nine was the year of statehood. The next year, 1960, a Kenyan student met a Kansan one in the Russian class at the University of Hawaii. The two married—an interracial marriage illegal in two dozen states at the time—and had a son, who would grow up partly in Hawai‘i, partly in Indonesia. In typical Hawaiian fashion, his profoundly multiracial extended family would grow by marriage to incorporate African American, British, Lithuanian, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Chinese elements. And in 2009 that son, Barack Obama, would become the first black president of the United States.

...“amphibious” packaging, made from newly developed materials that could withstand long voyages and exposure to the elements. Plasticized paper, silica gel, sisal, and asphalt featured in these multilayer packages, which portended today’s foil-plastic-paper shelf-stable milk cartons. Burlap sacks were similarly replaced by multiwall sacks of paper, plastic, and asphalt. Tin cans, for their part, could be coated in lacquer or enamel to withstand rust.

The Panama Canal Zone is a telling example. At the start of the Second World War, the United States had been so nervous about losing access to the canal that it established 134 bases in Panama. But at the end of that war, the military had gotten so comfortable moving around the planet without colonies that Harry Truman relinquished all those bases and proposed turning the canal over to the United Nations. Every president after Truman sought to extricate the United States from the increasingly irrelevant Canal Zone in various ways, though it wasn’t until Jimmy Carter’s presidency in the 1970s that a treaty ending U.S. jurisdiction over the zone was finally signed.


The Japanese were right to be nervous. Despite all the duck-and-cover warnings about Soviet strikes on Cincinnati and Dubuque, the real front lines of nuclear confrontation were the overseas bases and territories. Hundreds of nuclear weapons, we now know, were placed in South Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Throughout most of the sixties, there were more than a thousand on Okinawa. Johnston Island, one of the guano islands Ernest Gruening had recolonized, bristled with nuclear-armed Thor missiles. An unknown number of nuclear weapons were stored in Hawai‘i, Alaska (including on the Aleutian Islands), and Midway.


The U.S. military was the largest and one of the most exacting standard-setting agencies on the planet. Producing for it was like having a well-paid internship: lucrative in the moment but also conferring skills that would prove extremely valuable later.

It is telling that one of the visitors from the United States whom the Japanese held in the highest regard was a statistician named W. Edwards Deming. He’d worked in logistics during the Second World War, and his specialty was quality control—techniques for ensuring that industrial products were built to specification (the Total Quality Management movement derived in part from his ideas). None of this earned him much renown in the United States, but he was, as they say, big in Japan. Engineers there flocked to his lectures, read his works, and signed up for courses from him. “I never felt so important,” Deming remembered. He received a medal from the emperor.

Was this because Deming was a genius? Probably not. It didn’t take Japanese engineers long to absorb what he knew and surpass it. Deming was famous, rather, for what he stood for. As one of Sony’s founders put it, he was the “patron saint” of quality control in Japan. In a dependent economy, where so much hung on winning military contracts and adhering to standards, that was the saint who was prayed to the most.

^ this is all pretty funny when you think about how much of "why are things in Japan so high in quality" explainers are like Le Japanese Culture & not the requirements of being occupied & to stay competitive. U.S. companies can afford to skimp on quality & they have tariffs on their side as the largest economic power if others are competing too hard against them.


Economists call it a “first-mover advantage.” But that advantage subsides with time. Once everyone uses 60-degree screw threads, there’s no benefit to having been the first one to have used them (though there may be other rewards for having gotten ahead of the learning curve). The longer the race, the less meaningful a head start is.

...

Once other countries mastered U.S. standards, they too could profit and even compete with the United States itself. It is telling that the countries hosting the most U.S. peacetime bases—such as Britain, Japan, West Germany, and South Korea—numbered among the United States’ most formidable competitors.

Well. This truly only applies as long as the U.S. isn't constantly trying to overthrow your government like it does with Latin America (and other places.)


The Russian military theorist Vladimir Slipchenko noted that the very spatial categories of war were changing. In the future, he suggested, area-based military concepts such as front, rear, and flank would be irrelevant. There would be only “targets and non-targets.” Further, Slipchenko predicted, “there will be no need to occupy enemy territory.” Controlling territory wouldn’t matter, because war was no longer about area. It was about points.

In search of security, the air force issued a contract for a $150 million compound in a remote location in the Saudi desert. “You can see something coming for miles,” the spokesman explained. It was to be a military oasis, with forty-two hundred beds and eighty-five buildings, including a dining hall, a gym, a swimming pool, and a recreation facility. What was most remarkable, though, was the builder that the Saudi government hired to erect the base: the Bin Laden firm.

If there is one episode that perfectly captures the dual nature of the U.S. basing empire, it’s this one. Participation and protest—the Beatles and the peace sign, Sony and the Okinawa riots—braided within a single family. The Bin Ladens built the bases. A Bin Laden would seek to destroy them.

You might see the intrusions of colonialism into recent politics as a sort of hangover—a price paid for yesterday’s excesses. In this view, empire is an affair of the past, even if its effects linger on.

But empire is not yet past. In August 2017, North Korea, eager to demonstrate its destructive power but unable to reliably reach the U.S. mainland with its missiles, threatened to create “an enveloping fire” around Guam, which the United States uses as a launchpad to fly B-1 bombers over the Korean Peninsula. Yet again, it seemed that a territory might become a military sacrifice zone, and yet again the mainland press showed more concern for the fate of the troops stationed there than for the colony itself. “Guam is American soil,” its governor nervously reminded. “We are not just a military installation.”

The next month, Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico, taking out the island’s power grid, water system, and communications. It also exposed the parlous state of affairs in the United States’ largest remaining colony. Although Luis Muñoz Marín’s strategy of using tax loopholes to draw mainland corporations to the island had dramatically improved Puerto Rico’s economy in the 1950s and for decades after, Congress removed those loopholes in the 1990s, triggering corporate flight, economic collapse, and an exodus of employable Puerto Ricans to the mainland. By the time Maria struck, more than 60 percent of the island’s remaining inhabitants were on Medicare or Medicaid. Because the federal government funds those programs less generously in Puerto Rico than on the mainland, the commonwealth found itself accruing unsustainable debt to pay its bills.

The hurricane turned crisis into catastrophe. Puerto Ricans were knocked back a century as they made do without phones or electricity. Doctors were forced to perform surgeries by flashlight, city dwellers to search desperately for clean water. Hurricane Maria struck at nearly the same time as two other storms hit the mainland, Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma (which also struck the U.S. Virgin Islands) in Florida. The difference in response was palpable. Though Puerto Ricans were far more likely to die from storm damage, they saw fewer federal personnel, markedly less media coverage, and only a fraction of the charitable giving.

“Recognize that we Puerto Ricans are American citizens,” the island’s governor pleaded. Yet a poll taken after Maria found that only a slight majority of mainlanders (and only 37 percent of those under thirty) knew that fact.

There are about four million people living in the territories today, in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas. They’re subject to the whims of Congress and the president, but they can’t vote for either. More than fifty years after the Voting Rights Act, they remain disenfranchised. As Guamanians and Puerto Ricans have recently seen, this disenfranchisement carries potentially lethal consequences.

Empire lives on, too, in the overseas bases that dot the globe. It’s easy to think of foreign policy as an affair of the negotiating table: sovereign nation-states sit down to threaten, bargain, or cooperate. But U.S. foreign policy, nearly uniquely, has a territorial component. Britain and France have some thirteen overseas bases between them, Russia has nine, and various other countries have one—in all, there are probably thirty overseas bases owned by non-U.S. countries. The United States, by contrast, has roughly eight hundred, plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites. Dozens of countries host U.S. bases. Those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them. The Greater United States, in other words, is in everyone’s backyard.

So does all this mean the United States can be classified as an empire? That term is most often used as a pejorative, as an unfavorable character assessment. Empires are the bullies that bat weaker nations around. It’s not hard to argue that the United States is imperialist in that sense. Certainly its corporations and armed forces have spread themselves out comfortably all over the world.

Yet empire is not only a pejorative. It’s also a way of describing a country that, for good or bad, has outposts and colonies. In this sense, empire is not about a country’s character, but its shape. And by this definition, the United States has indisputably been an empire and remains one today.

Oddly, though the United States is frequently accused of imperialism, its territorial dimensions go largely unnoticed. So much energy has gone into presenting the United States via the logo map that even its critics, the ones most eager to cry empire, have little to say about overseas territory.

Still, if there is one thing the history of the Greater United States tells us, it’s that such territory matters. And not only for the people who live in colonies or near bases. It matters for the whole country. World War II began, for the United States, in the territories. The war on terror started with a military base. The birth control pill, chemotherapy, plastic, Godzilla, the Beatles, Little House on the Prairie, Iran-Contra, the transistor radio, the name America itself—you can’t understand the histories of any of these without understanding territorial empire.

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.

Idk zebra I think empire is pretty unequivocally bad and you don't need to pull your punches like that. Controlling a territory instead of treating them as an equal part & only allowing dogshit representation in gov? Yeah that fucking blows if you believe in democracy at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#books #nonfiction