In September 2017, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico with winds that exceeded 155mph, wreaking devastation and killing thousands. For months afterward, many parts of the island went without electricity and had limited access to potable water. Ultimately, the island received only a fraction of the aid and personnel support that had gone to Florida and Texas that same year, when they were struck respectively by Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Harvey.
This is but the latest chapter in a long history of neglect for Puerto Rico, which was colonized by the United States in 1898 and had been made vulnerable long before the storm by decades of congressional inaction and ballooning debts. This state of deprivation was spurred by a mainland indifference to the Puerto Rican colony—as West Side Story notes, “Nobody knows in America, Puerto Rico is in America.”
This willful ignorance, which is mirrored in its treatment of other territories, reflects a longstanding American unease with its own empire. Nonetheless, as Daniel Immerwahr documents in his latest book, How to Hide an Empire, “The history of the United States is the history of empire.” Tracing everything from early settlers’ constant encroachment on Indian territory to the colonization of the Philippines, his sweeping history demonstrates how the United States’ often overlooked territories and colonies have nonetheless played a critical role in shaping American politics, commerce, and culture.
I interviewed Immerwahr to discuss How to Hide an Empire, the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, the telling absences in our COVID-19 maps, and much more.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.
I thought I’d begin by asking about the aesthetics and ephemera of the U.S. empire. Before reading the book, I hadn’t put together that Manila envelopes and folders were named after the Filipino city because of our colonial relationship to the Philippines. What other everyday objects or products might the average American not realize came to us from our colonial and territorial holdings?
That’s a great question. You know, it’s hard, if you’re in the British Isles, not to be aware that Britain colonized India and many other places, because the artifacts of the empire surround you. And one of the interesting things about the United States’ colonial empire is that it’s quite possible to live on the mainland and not be confronted with the material reality that the United States has been and continues to be a country that holds territories. I think the United States is genuinely unusual [in that regard], but I’ll give you one example: The dollar bill we use was originally designed not as a mainland currency, but as a 10 peso note circulating in the Philippines. It was important to colonial officials to show Filipinos that they were now part of the United States, and that George Washington is an important civic figure in their lives as well as in the lives of mainlanders. That design became the basis for the familiar U.S. dollar that we know and use today.
I’d like to add that this wasn’t an original research find of mine—Alvita Akiboh, who wrote this terrific dissertation about colonial currency, figured all this stuff out.
Early on inHow to Hide an Empire, Theodore Roosevelt takes the stage and emerges as one of the great protagonists of the imperial era, becoming one of the strongest proponents for U.S. expansionism and one of its critical mythmakers. His emphasis on imperialism as a masculinist project and sort of a white man’s great adventure was particularly interesting to me. I was wondering, as our empire becomes quieter and less boisterous—if not necessarily less powerful—how do you think we should understand his legacy?
An interesting thing about the United States as an empire is that many of the colonies are acquired with enormous enthusiasm by people like Teddy Roosevelt, who believed that an empire could be a way to restore manhood to a nation that had grown soft since the Civil War—or that it was a chance for the white race to expand and manifest its destiny beyond even North America. But it doesn’t take that long, after the bulk of the populated overseas territories are annexed, for the sure, forthright imperialist culture to wane a little bit. But that doesn’t mean that empire goes away. Much in the same way that a couple can fall out of love but still remain married, a country can grow less publicly and forthrightly imperialist, but still very much be an empire.
And, in fact, the U.S. colonized population grew over the first half of the twentieth century, even as imperialist ardor waned. So, in that sense, the face of empire changes—it’s not Teddy Roosevelt eagerly storming up a hill in battle, but rather, a colonial official who’s dispatched to Manila or San Juan and might not even think or care much about those places.
So that’s the way in which the face of the empire changes. And I think the face of empire for the United States was also obscured after the Teddy Roosevelt moment. In the late 1890s, the desire for empire was clear—it was in newspaper headlines, people were talking about it, and the 1900 presidential election was pretty much about the fate of the empire. But by 1920 or so, there were far fewer discussions about the United States’ territorial empire, and it was quite easy for mainlanders to not really think about it at all.
Throughout the book, you show the many ways that cartography has reflected the national mood as well as the demands of those in power. Today, when I think about maps, my mind first turns to Google, and then occasionally to satellite and drone imagery. How do you think these kinds of cartographic tools are reshaping our mental image of the United States and the globe? Do they offer us opportunities to reimagine our imperial legacy?
They might. One thing: Although Google Maps is called Google Maps, it’s not itself a map. It allows you to view the world in lots of ways—in some ways, to make your own maps—using its symbology. And Google Earth allows you to see not just a map, but satellite photographs of the territory you’re trying to look at. So this allows for all kinds of interesting moves, where you can use Google Earth to spin the globe wherever you want it and look at it from the angle you’d like to see it. But Google maps and Google Earth don’t guide very much. They’re open tools, but they don’t tell you exactly how you should see the planet. So usually, we fall back on our conventional cartographic understandings.
The maps that are on my mind recently are the maps we’re all anxiously looking at: The COVID-19 maps produced by the New York Times and similar outfits. A thing that alarms me and some folks in Puerto Rico I’ve been talking to is that, by and large, these maps just include the states and D.C.; they don’t include the United States’ territories. That’s despite the fact that our data sets for the United States include COVID cases in Puerto Rico and, I believe, in all the inhabited territories. It’s despite the fact that one of the main news stories [in April] was precisely about the coronavirus in Guam. It’s hard, if you just look at the maps, to remember that the United States goes beyond the states—that there are five and a half territories, and that millions of people live in them. And, given the kind of infrastructure and financial support they get from the federal government, they’re disproportionately vulnerable to coronavirus.
ThroughoutHow to Hide an Empire, you see a lot of vigilantism and naked exercises of power, whether it’s western settlers forcing Native Americans into increasingly diminished Indian Country or Douglas MacArthur coming out of World War II the absolute ruler of close to 80 million people, albeit for a brief period. Did researching these cases—and the questionable jurisprudence that supported them, like theInsular Cases—change your perspective about how the law operates or shapes state power?
Well, I think it’s really tempting to conflate empire, which is a structure of governments, with imperialism, which is an attitude. And when you think about the settlers illegally squatting on Native American lands—violating federal laws, but also shaping federal laws as they do it, as they drag the government behind them—that’s a view of imperialism or empire that really has imperialism fully in the picture. You see white men who are eager to dispossess Indigenous people of their land, and you see it as a violent process. But one thing that comes up in my book a lot is that the edge of expansion is not the entire story. There are territories the United States has claimed in a fit of enthusiasm for empire—but then it just has these territorial possessions whether or not it still has those feelings.
The United States is the global hegemon; it is the rules setter. It is central to all international politics in a way that no other country is. And one expression of that—certainly not the only expression—is the fact that it has around 800 overseas military bases.
You also referenced Douglas MacArthur, which is a little different. He’s not a vigilante. He’s an appointed official of the U.S. government. There’s one moment when he leaves the employ of the U.S. army and joins the Philippine Commonwealth government, but he’s still part of the U.S. government in some fashion. And actually, a lot of the most dangerous and harrowing moments in the United States’ imperial history don’t happen because of trigger-happy frontier dwellers who lust for violence. They happen according to bureaucratic logic, by which some people just don’t register as really important—and those people’s lives are endangered in enormous ways because professionals venture into the colonies and realize these are convenient places where they can do medical experiments and things like that.
So I think we always imagine empire as being entirely a project of violent frontier dwellers. But that’s not quite right. There’s also this calmer, but no less lethal version of empire that’s just run by officials wearing suits.
Toward the end of the book, when assessing the United States’ vast array of bases and our larger “pointillist empire,” you write, “It’s easy to think of foreign policy as an affair of the negotiating table . . . But U.S. foreign policy, nearly uniquely, has a territorial component.” That “very uniquely” qualifier interests me—why do you think we haven’t seen more attempts to emulate the U.S. approach, of the latter twentieth century and present twenty-first century, to empire?
I think, if you imagine the United States was just a country among others, you might think, “Okay, well, it’s going to have some overseas military bases, and so will Britain, France, Russia, and China.” Maybe it’ll have a little more because it’s an unusually great country, if that’s your view, or an unusually rapacious one, if that’s your view—but you just see it as like the other countries, but perhaps with the dial switched up a little further. That’s not really true, though: The United States has had a distinct structural position since the end of World War II. It is the global hegemon; it is the rules setter. It is central to all international politics in a way that no other country is. And one expression of that—certainly not the only expression—is the fact that it has, we think, around 800 overseas military bases.
Just for contrast, if you take every foreign military base controlled by every other country, every country that is not the United States, and you add all of them together, you get a number somewhere around 30 or 40. So that’s an enormous difference. And that’s not just because the United States is more militaristic, it’s because it’s been serving a different function and it’s tasked for itself a different function–basically, the dispenser of violence of last resort. All kinds of military operations in some fashion go through the United States. And one of the facets of that is the United States has these little bits of land over which it claims jurisdiction all over the planet. That creates all kinds of interesting political ramifications. It’s very easy to miss those if you just think of the United States as a country like any other, without realizing it actually has skin in the game all over the world. Other countries dealing with the United States are not just dealing with a foreign country—they’re dealing with a country that is often related to them as an occupier, or as the occupier of a neighboring country.
Could you talk a little bit more about what was unique about the post-World War II context that led to that outcome? We had many different models of empire leading up to that point, but coming out of that conflict, the empire the United States inherited and shaped was pretty distinct from what preceded it.
That’s right. So World War II catapulted the United States to a position of global leadership that’s sort of unfathomable. It was producing the majority of the world’s industrial products—not just more than any other country, but more than every other country combined. It had more gold than anywhere else in the world, and, I believe, more than any other country combined. It had more oil reserves than all of the other countries combined. It was at the summit of the world in almost every way. And so then there’s an interesting question:How would the United States wield that power, handle that power, express that power?
Territorially, the old rules of the game had been that, as countries got larger and more powerful, they claimed more territory. That’s not the only way they expressed their power, but it was an important one. That’s certainly the pattern for the British Empire. It was the intended pattern for the German and Japanese empires. In fact, that’s largely what World War II was about. And an interesting thing about the United States is that, at this moment of having reached the summit of imperial possibility, the United States did not use its enormous military capacity to lock down as much territory as possible. It had the military opportunity to, but it didn’t seek to do that. Largely, it sought at this moment to distance itself from colonial empire. That doesn’t mean it gave up all of its territories—it didn’t. The United States still has five inhabited territories today. But nevertheless, it let its largest territory, the Philippines, go. Two of its other largest territories, Hawai’i and Alaska, were promoted to statehood, which made them no longer territories in the same sense.
It sought a different kind of political settlement for Puerto Rico. One can argue about whether it achieved that or not, but nevertheless, it did. It tried. And there, it might be tempting to think that thereby the United States had partially or mostly decolonized, that it wasn’t interested in empire. But if you think that, what you’re missing is that, at the same time, the United States doubled down on a worldwide system of hundreds of military bases, and those military bases—just with their slim territorial footprint—gave the United States many of the benefits that were formerly derived from having a territorial empire at a global scale. It could get these benefits without taking a lot of acreage. If you mashed together all of the military bases the United States holds today that we know about, you’re talking about a land area roughly comparable to Houston. That’s not a lot of territory, but nevertheless, we would be living in a vastly different world if all of those disappeared and the United States had no overseas territory in the form of military business.
In the book, while discussing the rapid changes in the United States’ territorial holdings during the fifties and sixties, you argue that a key under-discussed driver towards statehood for Hawai’i and Alaska was the collaboration between the civil rights movement and those fighting to decolonize. Can you talk a bit more about how these groups came together and how they came to see their struggles intertwined?
So both Hawai’i and Alaska had been kept at bay as states for quite a long time by Congress, because they didn’t have majority white populations. There was some initial thought in the early twentieth century that these places might be suitable destinations for white settlers. But there were never so many white settlers in the first half of the twentieth century to completely dislodge the native populations, or in the case of Hawai’i (and to a lesser degree in the case of Alaska), the Asian populations that had come over, often as laborers. So they hadn’t had the same kind of logic as territories like California had, which quickly filled with white settlers and then were promoted from territories to states. By the late 1950s, they started to be more of a precarious political issue for two reasons. One is that the continued territorial status of Hawai’i and Alaska meant that, on an international stage, the United States had to treat them with respect to the UN as colonies, and had to give annual reports on its non-self-governing territories—and that included Hawai’i and Alaska. And this was a point that the Soviet Union could prod the United States for and basically make the United States look less than democratic on an international stage. At the same time, civil rights activists within the U.S. mainland understood that if they could achieve statehood for Hawai’i and Alaska, they would expand their camps.
At the time, in the 1950s, it was thought that if Alaska and Hawai’i became states, Hawai’i would be Republican and Alaska would be a Democratic state. Now, it turns out that that’s exactly wrong—right now, Alaska is a deep red state, and Hawai’i is a deep blue state. But the important logic, in a sense, wasn’t the partisan logic—it was where these states stood on civil rights, because defenders of Jim Crow knew that if Alaska and Hawai’i were admitted as states, they would join the civil rights camp and erode the precarious political support, for Jim Crow in the Senate.
And that’s exactly what happened. So it was a kind of political victory for civil rights advocates who also looked to Hawai’i particularly, and Alaska to a lesser degree, as racially different kinds of spaces. Martin Luther King, Jr. was really interested in Hawai’i; he’d been there. He regarded it as exhibiting the kind of racial integration that he hoped to see in the U.S. mainland. So it wasn’t just political power—it was also the idea that you could admit a state like Hawai’i that would cough up political representatives who weren’t white. And indeed, Hawai’i’s first congressional delegation included Hiram Fong, who was the first Chinese-American senator, and Daniel Inouye, who was the first Japanese-American member of the House of Representatives. That’s a different kind of political slate than other states were coughing up at the time. And so I think Martin Luther King, Jr. was correct to think that not only were these different kinds of societies, but they might alter what U.S. politics was.
Source link : http://newamerica.org/weekly/empire-plain-sight/
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Publish date : 2020-10-14 03:00:00
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