Top Quotes: “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States” — Daniel Immerwahr

Introduction

“Nine hours after Japan attacked the territory of Hawaii, another set of Japanese planes came into view over another U.S. territory, the Philippines. As at Pearl Harbor, they dropped their bombs, hitting several air bases, to devastating effect.

The army’s official history of the war judges the Philippine bombing to have been just as disastrous as the Hawaiian one. At Pearl Harbor, the Japanese hobbled the United States’ Pacific fleet, sinking four battleships and damaging four others. In the Philippines, the attackers laid waste to the largest concentration of U.S. warplanes outside North America — the foundation of the Allies’ Pacific air defense.

The United States lost more than planes. The attack on Pearl Harbor was just that, an attack. Japan’s bombers struck, retreated, and never returned. Not so in the Philippines. There, the initial air raids were followed by more raids, then by invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos — U.S. nationals who saluted the Stars and Stripes and looked to FDR as their commander in chief — fell under a foreign power. They had a very different war than the inhabitants of Hawaii did.

Nor did it stop there. The event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on U.S. and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the U.S. territories of Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island, and Wake Island. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.

It was a phenomenal success. Japan never conquered Hawaii, but within months Guam, the Philippines, Wake, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong all fell under its flag. Japan even seized the westernmost tip of Alaska, which it held for more than a year.

Looking at the big picture, you start to wonder if “Pearl Harbor” — the name of one of the few targets Japan didn’t invade — is really the best shorthand for the events of that fateful day.”

“The Hawaiian island chain — the whole chain, not just the eight main islands shown on most maps — if superimposed on the mainland would stretch almost from Florida to California.”

“The U.S. has roughly eight hundred overseas military bases around the world

These tiny specks — Howland Island and the like — are the foundations of U.S. world power. They serve as staging grounds, launchpads, storage sites, beacons, and laboratories.”

Manifest Destiny

“He proposed drawing a settlement boundary, just as the British had, and prosecuting as a felon any citizen who crossed it.

Part of the objection was social; the founders were men of culture and sophistication who found rough frontier life troubling. Yet there was a deeper issue involved. As Boonesborough’s settlers had discovered, the United States wasn’t the only country with claim to the land west of the Appalachians. Native peoples — organized as nations, tribes, confederacies, and other durable polities— had their own cartography, their own way of mapping North America. And, in the late eighteenth century, they could back their maps with force. This was the raw nerve Daniel Boone had touched.

By hauling white settlers west, he was invading Indian lands. That meant fighting, fighting of the sort that might easily draw the United States government in. It also meant a discomfiting blurring of the lines between European and Native. Boone had killed Indians, been captured by them many times, and seen a brother and two sons die by Indian hands. But he had also, during one of his stints in captivity, been adopted into a Shawnee family, receiving the name Sheltowee (meaning “Big Turtle”) and becoming “exceedingly familiar and friendly,” as he put it, with his “new parents, brothers, sis-ters, and friends.”

This was exactly the sort of business that put Washington in favor of enforcing a British-style settlement boundary. The matter wasn’t merely philosophical for him; it was also personal. Much of Washington’s wealth lay in large tracts of western land. That land would hold its value only if he could control its sale and settlement. “Banditti” such as Boone, who took land without consulting its eastern owners, were a threat. Boone himself was a particular threat, since his claims on Kentucky conflicted with Washington’s own.”

“Washington set his affairs in order, but he remained doubtful about westerners’ political allegiances. His fears were confirmed in the 1790s, when backcountry men in Pennsylvania refused to pay a federal tax on alcohol and threatened armed secession. It was the Boston Tea Party all over again, this time with whiskey. Yet, notwithstanding his own recent leadership of a revolution against the financial machinations of a distant government, Washington’s sympathy for the rebels quickly ran dry. Their opposition, he complained to Jefferson, had “become too open, violent and serious to be longer winked at.” Once again, Washington rode west across the mountains, this time to quash a rebellion. In the end, the uprising dispersed before Washington’s forces arrived.

But the episode remains, as the historian Joseph Ellis has observed, the “first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field.””

“Washington thus insisted that settlement proceed in a “compact” manner, under elite control. That way, the frontier would be not a refuge for masterless men like Boone but the forefront of the march of civilization, advancing at a stately pace.

To realize their vision, the founders created a distinct political category for the frontier: territory. The revolution had been fought by a union of states, but those states borders became ill-defined and even overlapped as they reached westward. Rather than dividing the frontier among the states, the republic’s leaders brokered deals by which none of the Atlantic states would extend to the Mississippi, which marked the western edge of the country: Instead, western land would go to the federal government. It would be administered not as states, but as territories.

The government accepted control of its first territory in 1784, when Virginia gave up its claims to a large swath of land north of the Ohio River. This cession came not two months before the United States formally received its independence when Britain ratified the Treaty of Paris.

This meant that, from day one, the United States of America was more than just a union of states, It was an amalgam of states and territory.”

“A bastion of Indian strength was the Cherokee Nation, whose land stretched across parts of Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia. Cherokee numbers had fallen, perhaps by as much as half, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the population started rebounding in the early nineteenth.

Not only were the Cherokees growing, they were carving out a place for themselves within the new republic by adopting aspects of European culture. They ran plantations, bought slaves, and built a capital (“It’s like Baltimore,” a leading Cherokee bragged). A silversmith named Sequoyah designed a syllabary, turning Cherokee into a written language. It caught on quickly with help from the tribes newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, published in both English and Cherokee. In 1827 the Cherokee Nation adopted a constitution, modeled on the U.S. Constitution. Voters elected a mixed-race, wealthy, Christian president, Koo-wi-s-gu-wi, who had fought beside Andrew Jackson and went by his European name, John Ross.”

“The Supreme Court declared Georgia’s actions unconstitutional. But high-court rulings meant little in the face of the squatter onslaught. Cherokee landowners watched with alarm as Georgia divided the Cherokee Nation into parcels and started distributing it to whites by lottery. In 1835 John Ross returned home to find a white man living in his house — Ross had to abandon his large estate for a one-room log cabin. Later that year, he was arrested on the trumped-up charge of inciting a slave rebellion. Other Cherokees faced similar harassment.”

“The Trail of Tears, as it is known in English, was a bitter march, undertaken by some on foot. Starvation, cold, and disease killed thousands, including Ross’s wife.

The deaths continued. Disease, hunger, and violence ravaged the new Cherokee land for years. The population resurgence of the early nineteenth century was obliterated. By 1840, deaths on the march, deaths in the new territory, and accompanying nonbirths had knocked the Cherokee population down by a third or half of what it would have been had the nation remained in the East.”

“Thomas Jefferson had fantasized about dividing the entire country, with Native on one side and European on the other — hence his plan for the Louisiana Purchase. By reserving most of the new territory for Indians, he could free up land in the East for whites.

For the first few decades of the country’s history, this continental-scale apartheid had remained informal and incomplete. It was the population boom — particularly the crisis surrounding the lands of the Cherokees and neighboring tribes in the Southeast in the 1830s — that gave the issue a new urgency. To handle it, Andrew Jackson sought and won new legislation to allow him to aggressively negotiate east-for-west deals. But making those deals plausible required having western land to offer. The Jackson administration thus sought to turn the West into something resembling an Indian colony. Forty-six percent of the United States — stretching from the top of present-day Texas to the Canadian border and from Michigan to the Rockies — would be officially designated Indian Country (known also as Indian Territory). It would be walled off from white settlement and commerce. If forced removal was the stick, this promise of a permanent territory, free of whites, was the carrot.

Jackson sweetened the pot. Within Indian Country, his administration proposed to designate a smaller-but-still-really-large area, somewhere between the size of California and Texas, as Western Territory. This would be an organized territory, governed by a confederacy of Indian polities and given a delegate in Congress. The goal, as the government’s representative explained, was that Western Territory would be “admitted as a state to become a member of the Union.””

“In the venerable U.S. tradition of naming places for the people who have been driven from them, the newly opened territory was called Oklahoma, a Choctaw word meaning “red people.””

Guano

““Poudrette,” a polite name for human feces sold commercially, was of special interest. Even Victor Hugo couldn’t run his harried hero Jean Valjean through the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables (1862) without pausing — pausing, indeed, for a whole chapter — to remark that it really would be better if some use could be found for Paris’s waste. In a section regrettably cut from the musical, Hugo outlined his plan for “a double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices,” to carry it back to the fields.

Large-scale fecal repatriation remained the stuff of fiction, though. City feces were too dispersed and heavy to collect and transport, and few of the other “soil amendments” lived up to their reputations.”

“Guano didn’t solve the soil exhaustion crisis, but combined with Chilean sodium nitrates, which companies started selling later in the century, it held it at bay.

Mined fertilizers kept industrial agriculture sustainable long enough for scientists to devise a more permanent solution: manufacturing fertilizer from the unreactive N2 in the atmosphere.

The breakthrough came in 1909, when Fritz Haber, a German-Jewish chemist, developed a technique for synthesizing ammonia, a nitrogen compound. By 1914, the experimental technique had become industrially viable, and in that year Haber’s method, called the Haber-Bosch process, yielded as much reactive nitrogen as the entire Peruvian guano trade. The difference was that Haber-Bosch, unlike guano mining, was infinitely expandable. It also didn’t require scouring the seas for uninhabited islands.

In a single stroke, Haber had opened the floodgates for the virtually unlimited growth of human life. The Malthusian logic was repealed. Soil exhaustion ceased to be an existential threat; you could just add more chemicals.

Without Haber-Bosch, the earth could sustain, at present rates of consumption, only about 2.4 billion people.”

“He had a central place within the German scientific establishment (a position he used to promote the career of a gifted young Jewish physicist named Albert Einstein). When World War I erupted, Haber volunteered his services. He suggested that the ammonia now pouring out of German fertilizer plants could be repurposed as explosives to bolster Germany’s dwindling munitions supplies. Since the war had cut Germany off from imported nitrates, this was an essential contribution. The president of the American Chemical Society calculated that Germany would have lost the war by early 1916 had Haber not replenished its stocks of nitrate explosives.

Nor did Haber stop there. He assembled a supergroup of German scientists, four of whom, like he, would go on to win Nobel Prizes. Overseeing their efforts, he introduced his second great invention: poison gas.

Not only did Haber invent it, he personally supervised its debut in 1915, releasing hundreds of tons of chlorine gas upwind of some Algerian troops at the Battle of Ypres. In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world trom starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.”

“After the war, Fritz continued his work, and his institute developed a promising insecticide called Zyklon A. In slightly modified form, under the name Zyklon B, it would be deployed on Fritz and Clara’s fellow Jews, though this time not on the battlefield, but in gas chambers. Clara’s relatives were among those who died in the camps.”

The Spanish-American & Filipino Wars

“Normally, when the president of the United States wants one thing and the assistant secretary of the navy wants another, both custom and Constitution dictate that the president prevails. But Roosevelt had an uncanny knack for orchestrating events in his favor.

It helped that he reported to John D. Long, the secretary of the navy, a mild-mannered, grandfatherly figure (“a perfect dear,” cooed Roosevelt) given to prolonged absences. Roosevelt had little patience for bureaucratic details, but there was one he comprehended with the utmost clarity: whenever Long was gone, Roosevelt was, technically, the acting secretary of the navy.

On February 25, 1898, Long took the afternoon off to visit an osteopath, and Roosevelt sprang into action. He ordered all squadron commanders to keep their ships full of coal, requisitioned supplies of reserve ammunition, alerted station commanders to the possibility of war, and sent demands to both houses of Congress for the unlimited recruitment of seamen. Most fateful were the orders he sent to Commodore George Dewey of the Asiatic Squadron.

A casual observer might have wondered why a revolution in Cuba required the attentions of the Asiatic Squadron. But Roosevelt, emboldened by Mahan, envisioned an all-out attack on the Spanish Empire. He hoped that if war came, “Dewey could be slipped like a wolfhound from a leash.” He thus ordered the commodore to amass his ships in Hong Kong and, in the event of war, attack the Philippines.

Secretary Long had instructed Roosevelt to “look after the routine of the office while I get a quiet day off.” When he returned, he was astounded to find that his subordinate had instead laid the groundwork for a transoceanic war. Nevertheless, probably fearful of taking any action that the newspapers might interpret as weakness, Long allowed Roosevelt’s orders to stand.

Predictably, McKinley succumbed to popular sentiment and agreed to war.”

“What happened next has been recounted so many times that it’s hard to register how bizarre it was. That the man who played such an important part in starting and expanding the war — a political appointee with no combat experience — should also become the hero of its decisive battle seems more fictional than factual. But an aura of “Wait, that really happened?” engulfed much of Theodore Roosevelt’s life.

After all, this was a man who was in turn a Harvard student, cowboy, policeman, war hero, and president, as well as an African explorer — virtually the entire list of boyhood fantasies, minus astronaut. Later in life, as he was about to speak at a campaign event, Roosevelt got shot in the chest at close range and then proceeded to give his intended speech for an hour as the blood ran from his body.”

“Aguinaldo’s forces had liberated most major cities and were laying siege to Manila. Aguinaldo understood all this to be part of the independence war of the Philippines, and in fact had already issued a declaration of independence, raised a flag, and played the Philippine national anthem. Yet, as in Cuba, Spain surrendered to the United States, not the local rebels. When the U.S. and Spanish forces brokered their secret agreement to stage a mock battle over Manila, it was on the condition that the Spaniards relinquish the city to U.S. troops only and that Filipinos not be allowed to enter.

As the Spanish governor-general explained, he was “willing to surrender to white people but never to Niggers.”

Filipinos who had besieged Manila for two and a half months, at the cost of thousands of lives, thus watched in astonishment as their allies entered the city unopposed, locked Filipino soldiers out, and fraternized with the enemy.”

One minute after the Spanish flag came down over Manila, an enormous U.S. flag climbed the flagpole in its place. The band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.””

“Although the country’s official name has always been the United States of America, in the nineteenth century it was common to call it the United States, or perhaps refer to it by its political structure: the Republic or the Union. Though inhabitants of the country were often called Americans, it is striking how infrequently America was used. Walt Whitman was fond of the term, as in “I Hear America Singing” (1860) or the Young America movement of which he was a member (Herman Melville, another member, also used America at times). But one can search through all the messages and public papers of the presidents — including annual messages, inaugural addresses, proclamations, special messages to Congress, and much more — from the founding to 1898 and encounter only eleven unambiguous references to the country as America, about one per decade.

Nor was the word America included in the patriotic songs that got sung before 1898. You won’t find it in the lyrics to “Yankee Doodle,” “Hail to the Chief,” “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” “Dixie,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” It isn’t even in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the 1814 composition later adopted as the national anthem. The word that does appear in nineteenth-century lyrics is Columbia, as in the District of Columbia, an earlier literary name for the country. Though they have fallen from favor today, “Columbia,” “Hail, Columbia,” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” were among the most sung anthems of the nineteenth century.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, though, all that changed. One sharp-eared British writer heard the switch. “For some thirty years prior to 1898, while thundere As been extremely in ene val use one might, up to that annus mirabilis, have travelled five thousand miles and read a hundred books and newspapers without ever having once come across it; United States’ being almost invariably the term employed by the American for his own country.” After 1898, though, he noted that “the best speakers and writers,” feeling that the United States no longer captured the nature of their country, switched to America.

If the “best speakers and writers” could be stretched to include presidents, that was true. Though McKinley, like most of his predecessors, declined to use America in his public addresses, the reluctance ended there. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, spoke of America in his first annual message and never looked back. In one two-week period, Roosevelt used the name more than all his predecessors combined had. Every president since has used America freely and frequently.”

“The Mexican War of 1846–48 had ended with U.S. forces occupying Mexico City. Some in Congress proposed taking all of Mexico. From a military perspective, that was entirely feasible. But South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, one of the nation’s prime defenders of slavery, objected. “We have never dreamt of incorporating into the Union any but the Caucasian race — the free white race,” he insisted on the Senate floor. “Are we to associate with ourselves, as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed races of Mexico?”

Apparently not. The United States annexed the thinly populated northern part of Mexico (including present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) but let the populous southern part go. This carefully drawn border gave the United States, as one newspaper put it, “all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people.””

“In the late 1860s the president of the Dominican Republic signaled that he would welcome the U.S. purchase of his country. President Ulysses S. Grant was eager for the deal — the Dominican Republic was, after all, prime sugar and coffee real estate. Yet even with a rich country served up on a plate, even at the urging of a popular war-hero president whose party controlled Congress, legislators wouldn’t swallow the bait. The Dominican Republic was “situated in tropical waters, and occupied by another race, of another color,” explained the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, and “never can become a permanent possession of the United States.””

“To win Filipinos over, they inaugurated an extensive campaign of sanitation, road-building, and education in the areas they controlled. In those they didn’t, they staged raids, shooting insurgents and torching villages.”

“The armies — both sides — carried disease with them on the march. So did the prostitutes who flocked to Manila and the countless refugees the war produced. People moved, as they never had before, in and out of malaria zones, carrying the infection in their bloodstreams. Aguinaldo contracted malaria, and it gutted the troops who fled with him to the mountains.

If movement spread disease, so did confinement. Re-concentration was, from an epidemiological perspective, a particularly horrifying tactic. It forced populations with different immunities and diseases together into close quarters in unsanitary conditions. At the same time, it cut Filipinos off from their fields, leaving them reliant on imported food, often nutritionally poor rice from Saigon, if they got food at all. Malnutrition increased susceptibility to many diseases, and it led directly to beriberi.

Beriberi, it should be noted, is an extremely hard disease to contract. To get it as an adult, you have to eat a profoundly restricted diet, such as milled rice and virtually nothing else, for months. But Filipinos, separated from their farms and able to purchase only the cheapest food, suffered from it in large numbers, probably in the tens of thousands. It struck babies the hardest. Although infantile beriberi was unknown to doctors at the time (thus unrecorded as a diagnosis, it is doubtless the reason why Manila during the war had the world’s highest recorded infant mortality rate.

Reconcentration took its toll on the countryside, too. Fields went untilled as farmers were forced into garrison towns. In a biblical turn, those untended fields attracted swarms of locusts, which further eroded the food supply. The U.S. Army exacerbated the situation by making war on food: burning grain stores, confiscating or killing animals, and installing blockades to stop trade. Guerrillas starved, but so did everyone else. Everyone, that is, but the U.S. soldiers. They sucked much of the rice, eggs, chickens, fruit, fish, and meat from the Philippine economy with their purchase orders. And after there was no longer enough meat left in the Philippine economy, the army bought refrigerated beef from Australia. With vaccines, fresh water, sanitation, and ample food, U.S. forces were only grazed by the diseases that decimated the colony.

Up to mid-1902, the U.S. military lost 4,196 men, more than three-quarters of whom died of disease. It counted around 16,000 combat fatalities on the opposite side. But that number represents only recorded war deaths and is a tiny fraction of total mortality. General J. Franklin Bell, the architect of the reconcentration strategy, estimated that on Luzon alone the war had killed one-sixth of the population, roughly 600,000.”

“In the years 1899–1903, about 775,000 Filipinos died because of the war.”

“Of course, we do want military glory,” wrote Twain, noting the death toll, “but this is getting it by avalanche.” On July 4, 1902, Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine War over. If De Bevoise’s calculations are right, it had claimed more lives than the Civil 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.”

“The McKinley administration wanted to ensure that U.S. property claims were protected (a serious concern, given that the Cuban revolutionaries had torched sugar plantations), and it wanted the right to intervene if Cuban politics started looking wobbly. Using the threat of continued military occupation as leverage, Wood got the Cuban legislature to agree to both demands — not only agree to them but write them into law. For more than thirty years the Cuban constitution contained an astonishing clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba (which it did, four times).

Cuba also agreed, as part of the price of getting Wood to leave, to lease a forty-five-square-mile port to the United States for military use. Guantánamo Bay, as the leased land was called, would technically remain Cuban territory, but the United States would have “complete jurisdiction and control” over it. It was an important post. Though the Chemical Warfare Service ran tests on animals — goats were a favorite — it insisted that all gases and equipment be ultimately tested on humans. Those humans were soldiers, recruited with modest inducements such as extra leave time or appeals to patriotism.

They participated in three types of tests. In the drop test, liquid was applied to their skin. In the field test, planes sprayed them from overhead. In the chamber test, sometimes called the “man-break test,” participants were locked in gas chambers and gassed until they faltered.

Those inhaling gas usually had protective gear, but the tests often pushed past the point where that gear functioned. In some cases, that meant days in gas chambers or in the jungle with gas bombs dropping overhead. Participants seeking to leave midway through were threatened with court-martial.

During the war, the military tested its gases and gear on more than sixty thousand of its own men. These tests were secret. They rarely appeared on service records, and participants were firmly instructed never to speak of them. By and large, the men complied. Although many suffered debilitating aftereffects — cancer, lung disease, eye problems, skin abnormalities, psychological damage, scarred genitals — the extent of the program remained unknown until the 1990s. Some participants told their families only on their deathbeds.”

“The United States was in a peculiar position. It had colonies, but they weren’t its lifeline. Oil, cotton, iron, coal, and many of the important minerals that other industrial economies found hard to secure — the United States had these in abundance on its enormous mainland. Rubber and tin it could still purchase from Malaya via its ally Britain. It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”). Yet the United States didn’t depend on its colonies in the same way that other empires did. It was, an expert in the 1930s declared, “infinitely more self-contained” than its rivals.

Most of what the United States got from its colonies was sugar, grown on plantations in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. Yet even in sugar, the United States wasn’t dependent. Sugarcane grew in the subtropical South, in Louisiana and Florida. It could also be made from beets, and in the interwar years the United States bought more sugar from mainland beet farmers than it did from any of its territories.”

“Since colonial sugar competed with mainland cane and beet sugar, mainland farmers demanded protection from it. Ernest Gruening objected to the farmers’ lobbying. Discriminating against colonial sugar, he testified to Congress, would perpetuate the notion that there were “two kinds of territory” in the country, “a continental and offshore America.” But Congress enacted sugar production quotas anyway. The territorial quotas were restrictive; those for continental cane and beet sugar were obliging. Through these and other legal mechanisms, the mainland secured economic relief while the colonies paid the cost.

Beet growers in Colorado weren’t the only ones worried about the colonies. West Coast labor unions nervously eyed the tens of thousands of Filipinos who competed with whites for agricultural jobs — since Filipinos were U.S. nationals, no law stopped them from moving to the mainland. Then there was the military situation to consider. Japan had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and seemed poised to advance on Southeast Asia in pursuit of colonies. The Philippines and Guam stood right in its path. Would the United States really go to war over these faraway, barely known, and not-very-profitable posses-sions?

Maybe it wouldn’t have to. Two years into the Depression, Calvin Coolidge noted a “reversal of opinion” about Philippine independence. A number of politicians, FDR included, were coming around on the issue. Rather than absorbing the Philippines’ trade and migrants and defending it against Japan, the new thinking went, why not just get rid of it?

The 1930s are known as a decade of protectionism, when the United States put up hefty tariffs to barricade itself against the world. Now it seemed that this spirit was going to change the very borders of the country.

The Philippines was going to be dumped over the castle walls.”

WWII

“The people of Hawaii watched as a colony best known for its beaches, flowers, and guitars became an armed camp. Parks and schoolyards were gutted by trenches, barbed wire littered the beaches, guards took up posts at major intersections, and thousands of concrete machine-gun nests appeared, suggesting the discomfiting possibility of bullets whizzing through downtown Honolulu.

The army and navy claimed hundreds of thousands of acres of land — sometimes bought, often simply taken. At its peak during the war, the army held a third of O’ahu.”

“Life in a war zone was a life shaped by precaution. It meant carrying around a gas mask when out (the University of Hawaii graduates processed in cap and gown and gas mask). It meant obeying strict curfews. It meant “blackouts”: extinguishing all light by which Japanese planes might navigate at night.

But the safeguards weren’t only against invaders. The military also insisted on extraordinary precautions against the people of Hawaii themselves. Hawaii was “enemy country,” as the secretary of the navy saw it, with a suspect population, more than one-third of which was of Japanese ancestry. Thus were the territory’s residents registered, fingerprinted, and vaccinated — the first mass fingerprinting and the largest compulsory vaccination campaign the United States had ever undertaken. They were required to carry identification cards at all times on pain of arrest.”

“The regulations emanated, without any legislative check or presidential oversight, from the Office of the Military Governor (OMG or, as some put it, “One Mighty God”). Like any deity, the military governor issued commandments that were onerous: the replacement of U.S. dollars with a Hawaii-only currency, travel restrictions, press censorship, mail censorship, wage freezes, and prohibitions on quitting jobs in key industries. He could also be a jealous god, as when he set a punishment of up to ten years’ hard labor for contempt toward the flag or when he forbade expressions of “hostility or disrespect” (in word, image, or “gesture”) toward himself or any member of the armed forces at places of amuse-ment. In other respects, the General Orders read like the Talmud, going well beyond matters of obvious military significance and ruling on the painting of fenders, the preservation of meat, the hours kept by bowling alleys, the transportation of pigeons, and the slaughter of hogs (up to a month in prison for butchering an underweight pig).

“My authority was substantially unlimited,” the military governor boasted in his diary.

Behind his many orders stood the strength of the armed forces. The manager of one of Hawaii’s radio stations recalled his first live broadcast under martial law. A naval officer came into the studio, drew his service weapon, and announced, “T’ve got a 45 in my hand and I’ll shoot you if you deviate from the script.” The officer was laughing, the manager remembered, but he wasn’t joking.

The military police were “known to be overzealous,” one Japanese Honolulan recorded in his diary. “They shoot first and ask questions later.”

Beyond guns in the street, the army established a system of provost courts to enforce its laws. The justice they dispensed was hasty and harsh. Trials were often held on the day of arrest and lasted minutes. In the first four months in Honolulu, a single judge dispatched about a hundred cases per day. There were no juries, no journalists, no subpoenaing of witnesses, and, for the most part, no lawyers. Armed military officials, who rarely had legal training, interpreted the facts and the law with maximum discretion — defendants could be and were convicted of violating the “spirit of martial law.” Not surprisingly, convictions were the rule. 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 Hawaiis 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. Perhaps a few, I like to imagine, were charged with making the aforementioned disrespectful gesture to a member of the armed forces at a place of amusement.

Once tried and, in all likelihood, convicted, defendants in these juryless trials could be fined thousands of dollars or incarcerated for up to five years (more serious crimes meriting longer sentences were handled in a different class of military court). The General Orders specified punishments of up to thirty days’ imprisonment for leaving keys in the ignition of a parked car, and of up to a year at hard labor and a $1,000 fine for buying marked playing cards.

Living under this regime could be exasperating. One motorist was fined $50, on the charge of assault and battery, for kicking his own car. One of the most disturbing cases involved a black man who, running away from a bar where he’d been threatened by a bouncer, collided with two military policemen. He was arrested, charged with assaulting a police officer, and sentenced to five years in prison.”

“Sentences of more than a year’s incarceration were rare, and there’s little reason to think that many languished in Hawaii’s prisons. Often, defendants were directed to donate blood in lieu of jail time or purchase war bonds instead of paying fines. In that way, the army compelled the people of Hawaii to engage in patriotic acts that, for mainlanders, were done by choice.”

“Martial law in Hawaii lasted nearly three years, which was two and a half years longer than Japan posed any plausible threat to the islands. Yet Hawaii’s military commanders repeatedly refused to relinquish control. The secretary of the interior started calling it the “American ‘conquered territory’ of Hawaii.”

What ended martial law, ultimately, was a series of legal challenges that brought the issue to public view — a rare occasion when mainlanders paid attention to the territories. The military’s lawyers argued before the Supreme Court that Hawaii’s territorial status permitted martial law. Plus, they added, Hawaii had a “heterogeneous population, with all sorts of affinities and loyalties which are alien in many cases to the philosophy of life of the American Government.”

The court, to its great credit, disagreed. Martial law in Hawaii was illegal, it concluded, and civilians there deserved the same protections as mainland civilians.

“Racism has no place whatever in our civilization,” one justice scolded. That ruling came, however, only in 1946 — by which time not only martial law but the war itself had ended.”

“Not long after Japan seized the Philippines, it moved on Alaska. In June 1942 Japan bombed Dutch Harbor and conquered the Aleutian islands of Agattu, Attu, and Kiska (“Somebody ought to be impeached,” grumbled Manuel Quezon when he heard the news of yet another bit of barely defended territory falling into Japanese hands). The Japanese occupied the islands for more than a year and transported Attu’s tiny population (42) to Japan as prisoners of war. Half of them died there.

The Japanese invasion forced the issue. The Alaska Command ordered that all Natives living on the Aleutians west of Unimak and on the nearby Pribilof Islands be removed and sent farther inland. This wasn’t from fear of disloyalty. It was, rather, a “for your own good” internment, a way to keep civilians out of a war zone (though Aleuts noticed that the white residents of Unalaska Island were allowed to stay).

Because Gruening and his colleagues had resisted the notion of Aleut internment, there were no plans in place. Nearly nine hundred Aleuts were shoved hastily onto ships (“while eating breakfast,” an officer on Atka recalled — “the eggs were still on the table”) and dropped off in unfamiliar Southeast Alaska. They found this new environment unsettling. By all accounts, the large stands of trees unnerved them. “Feels funny,” the chief of the Atka tribe noted with alarm. “No room to walk.”

The trees, though, were the least of the Aleuts’ problems. Their new “homes” were whatever spaces the navy could find on short notice: abandoned mining camps, fish canneries, and labor camps. Many lacked running water. And despite the millions the military was pouring into the Alaska Highway, it never found the money to fix the internment camps.”

“So they stayed, for years. After Japan had been rousted from the Aleutians and the tides of war had turned, there was little likelihood that the islands would face continued peril. At least, the government was comfortable taking the men of the Pribilof Islands back to their homes to work the 1943 seal harvest (the Fish and Wildlife Service had a lucrative deal with a fur company). But once the Pribilovians turned over the furs, they were sent straight back to the camps.

The long internment wasn’t born of any animosity toward the Aleuts. They weren’t the “enemy.” It just seems that officials found it easier to keep the Aleuts where they were — far away — than to bring them home. Plus, the military had taken over many of their homes. And because censorship was watertight, there was no public pressure. Nobody knew.

The delay mattered, though. Sickness in the camps — the predictable result of a near-total lack of infrastructure — turned to death. In the West Coast camps, the death rate of internees was no greater than that of normal civilians. But in Alaskan camps, by the war’s end, 10 percent had died.”

“The story of internment in the Greater United States does not end with Hawaiian martial law or the Aleuts’ relocation. Though the episode is barely known, the United States interned Japanese in the Philippines, too.

Roosevelt signed the infamous Executive Order 9906, calling for the internment of Japanese in the U.S. West, in February 1942, after much deliberation. The internment of the Japanese-ancestry population (numbering about thirty thousand) in the Philippines required less talk. Months before Pearl Harbor, the Philippine Assembly had passed a bill requiring foreign nationals to register with the government and have their fingerprints taken. Then, on the day of the attack, MacArthur ordered police to round up the Japanese population, including naturalized Philippine citizens and people of Japanese ancestry born in the Philippines. Only career consular officials were excluded.

This was not a polite affair. Soldiers raided Japanese homes, stores, and offices and dragged the Japanese out if necessary.”

“Osawa and his fellow internees are never mentioned in U.S. accounts of Japanese internment. That’s partly because of the general tendency to exclude the colonies from U.S. history, though it surely also has to do with the short-lived nature of the affair. Whereas West Coast internment, Hawaiian martial law, and Aleut internment lasted years, the Philippine internment was ended in weeks by the Japanese invasion in late 1941.

That invasion put internees like Osawa in an interesting position. On the West Coast, official fears that Japanese-ancestry residents would collaborate with Japan turned out to be baseless. There are only a handful of known cases in which mainlanders materially aided Japan. Yet in the Philippines the question of loyalty was posed in a much more acute way, as Japan had actually conquered the territory. Would the Japanese in the Philippines side with Japan or the United States?

Nearly unanimously, they chose Japan. The former internees, bearing guns provided by the Japanese army, took swift and brutal revenge on those who had locked them up. They then served the Japanese occupation as intermediaries and interpreters. Filipinos got used to seeing familiar faces — the gardener, the ice-cream peddler, the house servant — parading in Japanese military uniforms.”

“The “better to lose a building than an American life” logic succeeded in protecting mainland soldiers, In the month of fighting, 1,010 of them 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.”

“A GI came down his street handing out cigarettes and Hershey bars. Speaking slowly, he asked Villadolid’s name.

When Villadolid replied easily in English, the soldier was startled. “How’d ya learn American?” he asked.

Villadolid explained that when the United States colonized the Philippines, it had instituted English in the schools. This only compounded the GI’s confusion. “He did not even know that America had a colony here in the Philippines!” Villadolid marveled.

Take a moment to let that sink in. This was a soldier who had taken a long journey across the Pacific. He’d been briefed on his mission, shown maps, told where to go and whom to shoot. Yet at no point had it dawned on him that he was preparing to save a U.S. colony and that the people he would encounter there were, just like him, U.S. nationals.

He thought he was invading a foreign country.”

“Think of a Gl, 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.”

Post-WWII

“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.”

“It’s telling that flag designers often left things open. They sensed, correctly, that many futures were ossible. There were excited murmurs in Douglas MacArthur’s Japan about statehood, and Congress received a petition to make it the forty-ninth state. Mainland papers — including the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Times-Herald, the New York Daily News, The Atlanta Constitution, and the influential African American Amsterdam News — came out for Philippine statehood, which the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Military Affairs also supported. (“If the offer is seriously made we are only too willing to consider it,” the Philippine delegation to the UN General Assembly replied.) A congressman from California, meanwhile, proposed adding Iceland, then under military control, to the union (“the strategic soundness” of this, noted the New York Journal-American, was “manifest”). And in 1945 the House Committee on Naval Affairs raised the possibility of annexing Japan’s outlying and mandated islands as the “State of the American Pacific.””

“After the First World War, the United States had returned virtually its whole army to civilian status within a year. But in the face of the postwar tumult, the Truman administration worried about relinquishing the army. “We are now concerned with the peace of the entire world,” explained George Marshall, the army chief of staff. “And the peace can only be maintained by the strong.”

In August 1945 the War Department announced that it would need 2.5 million men for the coming year. Planes and ships could be used to command the seas and the air. But to run occupations and put down rebellions? You needed an army for that.

The problem was, the army had to agree. Marshall’s plan to keep men overseas provoked a furious reaction. Families of servicemen blasted their representatives with letters and buried congressional offices in baby shoes, all bearing tags reading BRING DADDY HOME. On a single day in December, Truman’s office estimated that it had received sixty thousand postcards demanding the troops’ return.

Politicians, fearing electoral consequences, pulled strings. As they did, the army emptied out. “At the rate we are demobilizing troops,” warned Truman, “in a very short time we will have no means with which to enforce our demands.” Worried about the “disintegration of our armed forces” being carried out at “dangerous speed,” Truman ordered a slowdown in January 1946. Troops would stay overseas, even if there were ships ready to take them back.

This was, for many, the last straw. Days after Truman’s announcement, twenty thousand GIs marched in Manila and gathered at the ruins of the Legislative Building. They wanted to go home, of course — that was the main thing, and for some the only thing. Yet others, including the leaders, had seen the Asian Spring firsthand and objected strenuously to being kept around to suppress it. “Let us leave the Chinese and Filipinos to take care of their own internal affairs,” one speaker urged. “The Filipinos are our allies. We ain’t gonna fight them!” cried another. The demonstrators read a letter of support from the Filipino Democratic Alliance. The organizers, meanwhile, passed a resolution declaring solidarity with the Filipino guerrillas.”

“The Manila protest set off a string of others. Twenty thousand soldiers protested in Honolulu, three thousand in Korea, five thousand in Calcutta. On Guam, the men burned the secretary of war in effigy, and more than three thousand sailors staged a hunger strike. Protests erupted in China, Burma, Japan, France, Germany, Britain, and Austria, too, with supporting demonstrations in Washington, Chicago, and New York.

“What kind of government is this?” asked one of the soldiers. “What are we that scream piously, “the world must be free, then keep it to ourselves?” That sentiment animated the most dogged of the protesters. Another GI complained that “in the Oriental surge toward freedom we cling to imperialism.” All the members of the 823rd Engineer Aviation Battalion in Burma, an African American unit, sent Truman a letter saying that they were “disgusted with undemocratic American foreign policy.” They did not “want to be associated” with the “shooting and bombing to death the freedom urge of the peoples of the Southeast Asiatic countries. We do not want to ‘unify’ China with bayonets and bombing planes.”

“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.”

Decolonization

“Policymakers in the 1930s hadn’t cared what the Indonesians, Indians, or Indochinese thought about Philippine politics. But now Asia was off the leash, and Washington was searching for its grip. Now it mattered. Dropping the badly bruised Philippines in exchange for goodwill within the tumultuous decolonizing world wasn’t a hard choice.”

“Acting swiftly, MacArthur exonerated Roxas, restored him to his former rank in the U.S. Army, and gave him full back pay for the time he was “captured” by the Japanese. MacArthur also reconvened the Philippine Assembly, even though many of its members had served the enemy. Predictably, they voted Roxas in as president of the senate, understanding that he would seek amnesty for collaborators. Which he did.

“Not a single senator can be justly accused of collaboration!” Roxas declared in the senate, to great applause.

Roxas’s government turned immediately on the guerrillas. Hukbalahap leaders were arrested for crimes ostensibly committed during the war. On one occasion, 109 guerrillas were surrounded by governmental forces, disarmed, forced to dig a mass grave, and shot.

The next year, with the support of some of the most powerful men in Philippine society, Roxas was elected president of the independent Philippines.”

“The United States was letting its largest colony go. And it was doing this, remarkably, so as not to look bad in the eyes of Asians.

What is more, it didn’t stop. 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.

Larger changes were afoot in Hawaii and Alaska. As “incorporated” territories, they had been slated — in a nonbinding way — for statehood. But that projected future had been based on the expectation of white settlement, and the white settlers had never arrived in the expected numbers. By the end of World War II, Alaska remained about half Native and half white. In Hawaii, whites were an outright minority. Many of the territory’s inhabitants, because they had come from Japan, weren’t even eligible for naturalized citizenship.

Countenancing Philippine independence had required U.S. leaders to let go of the racist fear that Filipinos couldn’t govern themselves. Ending the colonial status of Hawaii and Alaska required overcoming racism of a different sort. To accept Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood, mainland politicians would have to reconcile themselves to the prospect of states not firmly under white control.

In 1898 the fear of nonwhite states had motivated the resistance to empire. Decades later, in a country governed by Jim Crow, it was still present. The former president of Columbia University and Nobel laureate Nicholas Murray Butler warned that admitting Hawaii and Alaska to the union would “mark the beginning of the end of the United States as we have known it.””

“Truman, having already agreed to Philippine independence and the hollowing out of the army, saw which way the winds were blowing. “These are troubled times,” he wrote. “I know of few better ways in which we can demonstrate to the world our deep faith in democracy and the principles of self-government than by admitting Alaska and Hawaii to the Union.”

From 1948 on, Truman actively pursued that end, conscious of the “tremendous psychological influence” that converting those territories to states would have on “the hearts and minds of the people of Asia and the Pacific islands.””

“Whatever the party allegiances of these new states, their racial composition would put them firmly in the civil rights camp. Southern Democrats in the Senate, nervous about what these states would do to Jim Crow, threatened to filibuster. Thus opened a front in the war for civil rights that rarely gets mentioned. Racial liberals supported statehood, pointing to Hawaii especially as proof that integration worked. The champions of Jim Crow, meanwhile, replayed the greatest hits of 1900, rallying the old imperialist rhetoric in defense of their precarious position. Arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond, one of the longest-serving congressmen in the country’s history, lectured his colleagues on the “impassible difference” between Western civilization and Eastern ways. “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” he admonished, quoting Kipling.

Southern opposition stymied Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood through the forties and fifties, but it could not hold out forever. Well-known among the civil rights movement’s triumphs are the desegregation of schools won in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the prohibition of racial discrimination at the polls secured by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Less touted in the textbooks are the admission of Alaska and Hawaii as the forty-ninth and fiftieth states in 1959. But those, too, were serious blows against racism. For the first time, the logic of white supremacy had not dictated which parts of the Greater United States were eligible for statehood.”

“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.

Hawaii, 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.”

Experimentation & Sterilization on Puerto Rico

“The first experiment used medical students at the University of Puerto Rico. Despite having their grades held hostage to their participation in the study, nearly half dropped out — they left the university, were wary of the experiment, or found it too onerous. The researchers then tried female prisoners, but that plan fizzled too. In 1956 they began a large-scale clinical trial in a public housing project in Río Piedras.

The pill that Pincus’s team administered had a far higher dosage than the pill does today. Many women complained of dizziness, nausea, headaches, and stomach pains. The lead local researcher concluded that the pill caused “too many side reactions to be acceptable generally.” Pincus, however, was undaunted. He blamed the complaints on the “emotional super-activity of Puerto Rican women” and tried giving some the pill without warning them of its side effects — a clear violation of the principle of informed consent.

The next year, a team of researchers allied with Pincus began another large-scale trial of the pill in Puerto Rico. Yet again, the side effects were hard to ignore. One researcher noted that the women appeared to be suffering from cervical erosion (“whatever you call it, the cervix looks ‘angry’) but the tests continued. Stopping them would mean delaying approval from the Food and Drug Administration, which the researchers were eager to get.

They got it. In 1960, basing its decision largely on the Puerto Rican trials, the FDA approved the birth control pill for commercial sale.

Nor was it just the pill. With a supportive government and a network of clinics, Puerto Rico became a laboratory for all sorts of experimental contraceptives: diaphragms, spermicidal jellies, spirals, loops, intrauterine devices, hormone shots, and an “aerosol vaginal foam” known as “Emko” distributed to tens of thousands of women.”

“The practice began in Puerto Rican hospitals in the early 1940s, just as Luis Muñoz Marin was rising to power. It quietly spread, typically administered after the birth of a child. By 1949, a survey revealed that 18 percent of all hospital deliveries were followed by “la operación.”

No governmental program championed sterilization. The advocates were doctors themselves, both mainlanders and locals. Worried that Puerto Ricans lacked the education to use other methods of birth control, they steered their patients toward the surgical procedure. Sometimes, hospitals offered it free.

Did doctors go beyond mere steering? At times, yes. One hospital refused to admit women for their fourth delivery unless they agreed to be sterilized after. And most sterilizations were performed within hours of childbirth— hardly ideal conditions for informed consent.

Still, documented cases of outright compulsion are hard to find. And given Puerto Rico’s strict laws against abortion, taboos against contraception, and patriarchal culture, women had their own reasons to want the operation. “The only way to avoid having children was getting sterilized-free,” one remembered. “I just got my husband’s signature, went in and got operated on.”

Whether because doctors pushed or women pulled, female sterilization in Puerto Rico grew to staggering proportions. In 1965 a governmental survey found that more than a third of Puerto Rican mothers between the ages of twenty and forty-nine had been sterilized, at the median age of twenty-six. Of the mothers born in the latter part of the 1920s, nearly half had been sterilized.

Such numbers, stunning on their own, become even more so in comparative context. This was a time when India’s rate — one of the world’s highest — was six sterilizations for every hundred married women. Puerto Rico had more women sterilized, by far, than anywhere else in the world.”

“In 1947 Muñoz Marin’s party created a migration bureau, a rare case of a state agency dedicated to getting people to leave an area. The government distributed millions of pamphlets to help people adjust to life on the mainland. Muñoz Marín’s colleagues set up a three-month training program for women seeking to enter mainland domestic service. They practiced talking in English, washing dishes, polishing silver, answering the phone, and doing laundry.

When economic forces carry sojourners from a poorer area to a richer one, the fortune seekers are usually men. But the Puerto Rican Great Migration was strikingly female — in the half decade after World War II it was 59 percent so. That was partly because foreign women had a harder time crossing U.S. borders, which left an opening for Puerto Rican women, often in domestic service. But it also owed to the encouragement of the island government, which was eager to see the departure of women of childbearing age.

Many did leave. In 1950 about one in seven Puerto Ricans lived not on the island, but on the mainland. By 1955, it was closer to one in four.”

“A seven-city revolt in the United States’ largest colony that included an assassination attempt on its governor, that required suppression by airpower, and that nearly killed the U.S. president made brief headlines, but rarely were the dots connected. The New York Times shrugged it off as “one of those mad adventures that make no sense to outsiders.” It was, as one journalist put it, the “news of a day and quickly over, to be forgotten by the average American.”

“For Luis Muñoz Marin, the problem had been solved. The new constitution had erased “all traces of colonialism,” he insisted, and the economy was improving.

Yet not everyone agreed. Muñoz Marin’s chief legal adviser, who had drafted that constitution, maintained that Puerto Rico was still a colony, subject to the “almost unrestricted whim of Congress.” Nationalists, too, believed that all Muñoz Marin had done was brush empire under the rug. The UN’s reclassification of Puerto Rico as self-governing, in their eyes, only further perpetuated the lie that Puerto Rico was now free.

On March 1, 1954, shortly after the UN’s decision, four nationalists entered the House of Representatives in Washington. They made their way to the upstairs gallery, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, and shouted “Viva Puerto Rico Libre!” Then they pulled out pistols and fired twenty-nine rounds into the body politic below. It was, the Speaker of the House remembered, “the wildest scene in the entire history of Congress.” Splinters flew as the bullets sprayed over the chamber.

In all, five congressmen were shot. One, Alvin Bentley from Michigan, took a bullet in the chest and went gray. His doctor gave him a fifty-fifty chance of living. He did survive, as did the other four, but a colleague judged that he was never really the same.

To this day, the drawer in the mahogany table used by the Republican leadership has a jagged bullet hole in it.”

“Despite his extraordinary career, Pedro Albizu Campos is hard to find in surveys of U.S. history. He’s not in comprehensive scholarly series such as the Oxford History of the United States or The New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, and I haven’t found a single textbook used in mainland schools that mentions him. Even books designed to uncover suppressed histories, such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, ignore Albizu. The most important academic venue in U.S. history, The Journal of American History, has never discussed him.

Of course, Puerto Ricans themselves — on and off the island — are fully aware of Albizu. In my home city of Chicago, there’s a public high school named after him (with an adjoining family learning center for teen parents).”

Rubber

“Within months, it conquered the European colonies that accounted for 97 percent of the U.S. rubber supply. The United States and its allies were virtually cut off.

It is hard to convey how dire a threat this was. “If a survey were made to determine the most frequently asked question in America today, it would probably turn out to be: When are we going to get rubber — and how much?” wrote the secretary of the interior in mid-1942. “We must get rubber — lots of it — and get it rather quickly, or our whole manner of living will be sadly awry.”

A high-profile governmental report found the situation “so dangerous that unless corrective measures are taken immediately this country will face both a military and civilian collapse.” A military and civilian collapse? Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed, adding that in the short time since the report had been issued, “the situation has become more acute.”

The government scrambled to plug the gap. FDR begged citizens to turn over to the government “every bit of rubber you can possibly spare”: old tires, raincoats, garden hoses, shoes, bathing caps, gloves. The president’s Scottish Terrier, Fala, donated his rubber bones. Eventually nearly seven pounds of scrap rubber were collected for every man, woman, and child in the country. It wasn’t nearly enough. The government pressed engineers to explore substitutes. Could cars roll on wooden wheels? Steel wheels? No, they couldn’t.

Foreign markets might yield some rubber, and the State Department negotiated agreements with some twenty countries, mostly in Latin America. Yet the wild rubber secured from these was scant, and newly planted rubber trees would take at least six years to start producing.

Could rubber be extracted from some other plant? Thousands of scientists and technicians were hastily recruited to try — it was like the Manhattan Project for botany — but without success.

To conserve what little rubber remained, the government forbade its use in many forms of manufacturing. A national speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour was imposed to reduce the wear on the mainland’s tires. In June 1942 Roosevelt warned that confiscating civilian tires was a real possibility, perhaps an inevitability. A high-ranking official confided to a journalist that soon there might not be enough rubber for baby bottles. Another proposed reducing the length of condoms by half. It took his colleagues a moment to realize he was joking.”

“But Hitler had not solved the rubber problem. When the war started, Germany’s production and stockpiles sufficed for only two months of fighting. Throughout the war, the Wehrmacht was perpetually short of fuel and rubber. Hitler relied on risky blitzkrieg tactics — sudden all-or-nothing attacks — in part because he simply couldn’t confront his enemies in sustained combat. His troops moved largely using horses.

Desperate for more rubber, the Reich ordered IG Farben to build a new plant in the east, where it would be safe from Allied bombardment. Ultimately, this would be the single largest expenditure in the Four Year Plan.

The company chose a promising site in Upper Silesia, a railway hub close to supplies of coal, lime, and water, just outside the town of Auschwitz. To build the plant, the Reich expanded a transit camp, previously used to hold Polish prisoners pending their deportation farther east, into a massive, lethal Arbeitslager.

The Jewish chemist Primo Levi, who would go on to write one of the most haunting survivor’s accounts of the Holocaust, was an inmate at Auschwitz. He remembered the “brightly illuminated” sign outside the plant: ARBEIT MACHT FREI, “work makes one free” (it “still strikes me in my dreams,” he wrote). Levi toiled in the unforgiving Polish mud to build IG Farben’s plant. As it started to produce methanol and other supplies, he was moved to the laboratory. The new work assignment saved Levi’s life by protecting him from the worst of the bitter winter of 1944–45.

Others weren’t so lucky. In all, at least thirty thousand inmates died building the plant. Yet this forced march did nothing to improve Hitler’s rubber prospects. By the end of the war, the plant still hadn’t squeezed out a single pound of synthetic rubber.

Things went quite differently in the United States. The director of the U.S. rubber program was instructed to “be a son-of-a-bitch,” but that meant standing up to oil executives, not driving tens of thousands of enslaved laborers to their deaths.

Difference two: the U.S. program worked. There was no “eureka” moment when the secret to rubber synthesis was revealed. It was the result of a thousand little discoveries made by a small army of well-funded industrial chemists. Those scientists remembered it as a golden age, when men who had formerly labored as rivals in different companies could collaborate with a shared sense of purpose. “I don’t think I have ever seen as congenial a group of people work together,” said one.

The industrial achievements were as impressive as the scientific ones. By the end of the war, the government had built fifty-one synthetic rubber plants (compared with Germany’s three), operating at the collective cost.”

“Natural rubber, coming mainly from Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, still makes up about 30 percent of the market. Yet it’s no longer a vital necessity, the sort worth conquering territory to secure. When the supply drops, synthetic rubber plants make up the difference with ease.

One such factory is the one outside Auschwitz, which survived the war and is today the third-largest European source of synthetic rubber. That single plant in Poland has the capacity to satisfy 5 percent of the world demand for rubber.”

Plastic

“The first plastic, celluloid, was devised to replace ivory in billiard balls and then made its way into other household goods: combs, knife handles, dentures, and so on. Another, Bakelite, was proudly billed during the interwar period as the “material of a thousand uses.’ DuPont caused a sensation with its debut of nylon stockings in 1939 (“Better Things for Better Living … Through Chemistry”). In 1940 Henry Ford unveiled a plastic car, made principally of soybean-based resin. Ford’s car failed to stir the passions nylon stockings had, but it illustrated the boundless possibilities that entrepreneurs saw in plastic.”

“It took the war to make the plastic economy real. The calculus was the same as for rubber. The Axis powers, Japan in particular, had cut the United States off from vital supplies. So the military sought to use plastic, made mostly from oil, as a substitute for any “strategic” material that could no longer be easily got. As much as it could, the war effort should run on plastic.

As they had with rubber, chemists started sprinting. They pooled information, honed techniques, and experimented wildly. Synthetic rubber had substituted for one big thing. For plastic, they found countless little applications. As plexiglass, it could be the cockpit window of a plane. As cellophane, it could replace a tin can in food storage. Mixed with wood fiber as plywood, plastic could substitute for timber and steel in small boats, making them lighter, faster, and cheaper. Mixed with glass as fiberglass, it could be used to make planes.”

“Between 1930 and 1950, the volume of plastics produced annually in the world grew fortyfold. By 2000, it had grown to nearly three thousand times its 1930 size.”

“By that 1930s logic, the United States should have consolidated its victory in the Second World War by locking down resource-rich territories. In fact, there was some talk of this during the war. War planners recognized that the quest for resources had both triggered the war ánd deprived the United States of vital raw materials. As a result, they sought ways to prevent that from happening again.

The most popular plan within the State Department in the early years of the war was to place the world’s colonies under international management. This was a touch more enlightened than old-school conquest, but the end-state was much the same. Powerful countries would, through some international body, ensure their access to the tropics. It was colonization by committee.

But that vision was never realized. The United States neither claimed new colonies nor organized the joint colonization of the tropics. Instead, synthetics dulled its hunger pangs.”

“None of this is to say that raw materials became irrelevant. Minerals were harder to synthesize than plants, and military planners kept a wary eye on the global stocks of bauxite, uranium, and cobalt (essential now to smartphone batteries). But the sense of urgency had diminished enough for those commodities to be safely sourced through international trade rather than colonial extraction. That’s because national security no longer hung on raw materials. In fact, when Richard Nixon formed a commission to develop a “national materials policy” for the 1970s, the resulting report didn’t even mention security as a goal.

There was, of course, one exception: oil.”

Panama

“In 1969 the United States achieved what was probably its most technically difficult goal since the Second World War: the moon landing. The most powerful rocket engines in history had to blast the spacecraft into the sky, where the whole thing would progressively dismantle itself mid-flight, shooting a smaller module safely into the lunar gravity well. There is a reason that “rocket science” became the proverbial way to refer to the hardest intellectual challenges out there.

Yet it wasn’t all jets and orbits. The moon landing was a triumph of chemical engineering, too. NASA needed light materials that could endure extreme temperatures and micrometeoroid strikes, yet keep pressurized air in.

This meant synthetics.”

“In 1901, with Manila firmly under white control, General Arthur MacArthur staged a lavish reception in the Philippines for the upper crust of colonial society. The men decided to wear their best frock coats and silk hats. But clothing designed for temperate climates, they discovered, fares poorly in the tropics. The hats had warped, lost their sheen, become sticky, and started to emit a strange odor. Pests had chewed holes in the hat of the secretary of finance and justice. He wore it anyway, though, as he had no means of getting another.

And why not wear it? Many of the early U.S. colonial buildings, made with Oregon pine and California redwood, were also riddled with holes and falling apart. “Decay” was basically the house style.”

“What this rotting empire needed was faster transportation. And that required seizing land. Captain Mahan had suggested opening a canal through the Central American isthmus, which divided the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and Roosevelt agreed. He tried to buy territory from Colombia, without luck. He tried threatening and got no further. Finally, concluding that bargaining with Colombia’s leaders was liking trying to “nail currant jelly to a wall,” Roosevelt threw his support behind rebels, who declared Panama’s independence from Colombia.

Those fit to work faced other challenges. The area to be dug out was a “dark and gloomy jungle,” one early arrival noted, “an apparently hopeless tangle of tropical vegetation, swamps whose bottoms the engineers had not discovered, black muddy soil, quicksands.” The ruins of a previous French effort to dig a canal — abandoned equipment rusted, sunken into the earth; and covered in vines — served as an ominous warning.”

War by Air

“It could be seen in the “island-hopping” strategy MacArthur and Nimitz used to storm the Pacific. Instead of fighting for contiguous areas, they overleapt Japanese strongholds and pressed onward. Aviation allowed this.

It also allowed the Allies to do something extraordinary: defeat Japan without setting foot on its main islands.

Instead, using bases at Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima, they laid waste to nearly seventy Japanese cities by air.”

“The British, champions of the cable game, had by the early twentieth century gained control of more than half the world’s cables. They also, through Malaya, possessed the world’s sole supply of the natural latex guttapercha — the only material until plastic that could effectively insulate deep-sea submarine cables.

Yet mere preponderance wasn’t enough. The British obsessed over acquiring an “all red” network, red being the color of the British Empire on the map. Such a network, passing only through British territory, would offer protection from foreign powers that might cut or tap Britain’s cables.

Britain achieved its all-red network and, with it, invulnerability. Everyone else, meanwhile, learned the cost of not having a secure network. In the opening days of the First World War, Britain cut Germany’s transatlantic cables — something it could easily do, as Germany did not control the territory around them. The Germans were then forced to use unreliable intermediaries to carr their messages, which opened them up to espionage 1917 the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmerm sent a proposal to Mexico promising to help Mexico “reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona” in exchange for an alliance. But the British intercepted the message and shared it with Washington. The “Zimmermann Telegram,” as it is now known, was crucial in drawing the United States into the war.”

Transport

“A group of new sulfonamide-based drugs could treat dozens of bacterial diseases and infections: gonorrhea, pneumonia, strep throat, burns, scarlet fever, dysentery, and so on. Penicillin, the most powerful bacteria killer, was honed during the war, too, turning battlefield injuries from likely killers to recoverable setbacks. The death rate for all disease in the army in World War II was just 4 percent of what it had been in the First World War.

The new drugs and sprays not only made war safer, they made movement safer. No longer were areas like Panama graveyards for mainlanders, the sorts of places to which they’d bring their coffins in their luggage. fact, during the war the United States established 134 bases in Panama outside the carefully policed Canal Zone. Those bases were partly to protect the canal, but they also served as places to practice maneuvers and experiment with chemical weapons, such as the jungle tests Cornelius Rhoads oversaw.

Using the Panamanian jungle for tests or training would have been insane a few decades earlier. But with Skeeter Beaters (which could kill 95 percent of the adult mosquitoes), insect repellents, antimalarials, mosquito netting, and ground spraying, a forbidding environment became hospitable. The soldiers plunged into the thick brush. And they were fine.”

“We rarely contemplate this, but for most of history, objects hadn’t been built to travel. The predicament of the attendees of Arthur MacArthur’s 1901 party in the Philippines —their buildings rotting, their hats dripping down their faces — had been a perpetual hazard.

The troubles with transport continued into the Second World War, which exposed vital material to rough handling, sandstorms, high altitudes, subzero temperatures, seawater, and sweltering jungles. An observer visiting New Caledonia in MacArthur’s command was shocked by what the climate had done to storage depots. Cans were “completely covered by rust.” Wooden crates, which worked perfectly well on the mainland, had rotted so badly that “the wood could be mashed between one’s fingers.” The center of large stacks of stored food “looked like a big mold culture.”

Specialized equipment proved especially vulnerable. Gas masks and electrical equipment grew fungus in the tropics. Batteries were particularly finicky, giving perpetual trouble. In New Guinea, ants chewed through the insulation on telephone wires and radio equipment. An inspection on major Pacific bases found that 20 to 40 percent of the material in depots was unusable.

Yet again, the engineers went to work. Their task was a remarkable one: to world-proof the inventory of the military. To make sure that objects didn’t stop working whenever they moved.

The quartermaster’s office devised what it called “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.

It went beyond the packaging. The military also learned to world-proof its equipment, rendering objects themselves suitable for any climate. Material was coated, sprayed, and sheathed in plastic to render it impervious to the elements. One of the most impressive achievements, because it was so complex, was the rugged, portable high-frequency radio unit developed for use in the field.

In area after area, the military confronted the challenges of world shipping. It is in no small part due to its accomplishments that our world today is the way it is — a place where objects are not confined to climatic zones, but can move without malfunctioning.”

“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.”

“In their haste, the occupiers had failed to sign any agreement granting the Western powers access to their zones in Berlin. Since all the ground approaches passed through Soviet-occupied Germany, this meant that Joseph Stalin could entirely blockade the Western sectors of Berlin. Which, in 1948, he did.

It was a bold move. Berlin was importing fifteen thousand tons of goods per day. Stalin apparently hoped that by sealing it off, he could force the West to abandon it and perhaps retreat from Germany altogether.

That probably would have worked in the past.”

“The aircraft, departing from bases in western Germany, flew necessities: coal, oil, flour, dehydrated food, and salt. But they also flew grand pianos and, in one case, a power plant. Berlin’s economy ran by air. Stalin, ultimately, could not hold out — the blockade hurt him more than it hurt his adversaries. In the eleventh month, after more than a quarter of a million flights, he lifted the barriers.

The lesson was clear: Stalin had territorial control, but that didn’t mean what it used to.

It was a lesson Moscow would be taught repeatedly. Starting in the late forties, the United States started beaming radio broadcasts into the USSR and its satellites —the communications equivalent of the Berlin Airlift. A few high-powered broadcasting stations in Western Europe were all it took to shred the informational sovereignty of the Eastern Bloc. The Voice of America and two CIA-backed operations, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation (later renamed Radio Liberty), egged on dissenters, incited uprisings, and aired governmental secrets.

The Soviets tried to jam the broadcasts; by 1958, they were spending more on jamming than on their own transmissions. But they never managed to shut off the stream of information. Multiple times it appears that the Soviets assassinated or tried to assassinate Western journalists. In 1981 the headquarters of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Munich was bombed. Yet not even that stopped the broadcasts.

“When it came to radio waves, the iron curtain was helpless,” remembered Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland’s dissident Solidarity movement. Solidarity had relied heavily on Western radio, which Walesa credited with the collapse of communism in Europe.”

Standardization

“In 1904 a massive fire ravaged Baltimore. Engine companies sped from New York, Philadelphia, Annapolis, Wilmington, and Harrisburg to help. Yet there was little they could do, for when they arrived, they found that their hoses couldn’t connect to Baltimore’s hydrants (or, indeed, to one another’s hoses). For thirty helpless hours they watched as 1,562 buildings burned.

Through the early twentieth century, compatibility failures like that were chronic, and they made any attempt to move between jurisdictions exasperating. A “bushel” of greens weighed ten pounds in North Carolina, thirty in neighboring Tennessee. The standard berry box in Oregon was illegal in California. Every time truckers crossed state lines, they had to pull over to demonstrate that their vehicles conformed to local standards. And they didn’t always. Height, length, and weight allowances varied wildly from state to state, so that the longest permissible truck in Vermont, a 50-footer, was 24.5 feet too long to enter Kentucky.

College football was a popular sport in the 1920s, yet it wasn’t until 1940 that colleges agreed on what a “football” was. Home teams would just supply whatever vaguely football-shaped objects they wanted. Teams that liked to pass used slim balls, teams that emphasized kicking (which early football rules encouraged) proffered short and fat ones.

It wasn’t until 1927 that traffic lights were standardized. Before that, drivers in Manhattan stopped on green, started on yellow, and understood red to mean “caution.” A different system prevailed in Cleveland, a different one in Chicago, a different one in Buffalo, and so on.

It’s easy to ignore standards. But once you start thinking about them, you see them everywhere. You realize how much relies on the silent coordination of extremely complex processes.”

“He may have been a maladroit politician and a poor steward of the economy, but Hoover was an astonishingly capable bureaucrat. And there was little he cared about as much as standardization.

Herbert Hoover, as a man, can best be understood as the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt. Whereas Roosevelt lusted for combat and styled himself as a cowboy, Hoover was a Quaker who had lived for a year among Osages in Indian Country (he later had Charles Curtis, a Native American with Osage heritage, as his vice president). Roosevelt chafed at rules; Hoover once refused to let former president Benjamin Harrison into a college baseball game without a ticket. Roosevelt gave his horse the dramatic name Rain-in-the-Face; Hoover’s animal companion was a cat, whom he addressed as Mr. Cat.”

“Perhaps the only thing you need to know about Herbert Hoover is that he wore a jacket and tie to fish.”

“Mainlanders venturing out to the colony needed the attention of nurses, particularly given the diseases that the war had unleashed. And yet, since few mainland nurses were willing to move to the Philippines, that meant relying on Filipinos. Soon after annexation the government began training them.”

“Aligning nursing practices in the Philippines with those of the mainland made the empire run smoother. But it has also had a profound unintended consequence. Once standards are firmly established, they are hard to dislodge, and the Philippines has remained, even after independence, extraordinarily U.S.-centric in its nursing practices. So, as the U.S. population has aged, requiring more health care, and as the Philippine economy has faltered, more and more nurses from the Philippines have left to work in the United States. Today, a massive pipeline carries tens of thousands of Filipino nurses to jobs in U.S. health centers.

At this point, not only are Filipino nurses training in preparation for emigration, but Filipino doctors are retraining as nurses so that they too can find work abroad.”

“Getting brick manufacturers in one country to agree had been difficult enough. Who was going to get French brickmakers into agreement with Japanese ones? The difficulty of standardizing across jurisdictions explains why countries through the first half of the twentieth century had largely distinct material cultures.”

“The international Convention on a Uniform System of Road Signs and Signals reproduced the U.S. practices with remarkable fidelity. Traffic light colors, pavement striping rules, and even to a large degree road signs followed the U.S. system, including the well-known yellow octagon with the word stop printed on it.

Wait — yellow? Yes. The octagonal stop sign came from Michigan, born when a Detroit police sergeant clipped the corners off a square sign to give it a more distinctive shape. But the early signs were yellow, not red. The first national agreement of U.S. state highway professionals rejected the use of red on any sign, since it was hard to see at night. So the U.S. stop sign, adopted as an international standard in 1953, was yellow.

Yet just a year later, in 1954, the United States changed its mind about the yellow. Experts thought that red better signified danger, and new developments in industrial chemistry allowed for durable, reflective red finishes.

So, to what I can only imagine was the apoplectic fury of traffic engineers worldwide, the United States abandoned the global standard — its own standard, designed in Michigan and foisted on the world — and began to replace its yellow signs with red ones.

This, more than anything, showed the stupefying privilege the United States enjoyed in the realm of standards. It could force other countries to adopt its screw thread angle in the name of international cooperation. But it was never bound by those imperatives itself.”

English

“English proficiency rose, but slowly. By 1940, roughly a quarter of Puerto Ricans and Filipinos could speak the language. In Hawaii, a polyglot pidgin was still the language of the streets.

The wider world was no better. Among Western countries, English deferred routinely to its rivals. French was the language of diplomacy. In science, French was joined by German and (in chemistry) Russian. As late as 1932, French was allowed as an official language at 98.5 percent of international scientific conferences, whereas English was accepted only at 83.5 percent.”

“The army launched a training program to give soldiers a crash course in the languages they’d need to fight a global war. Eventually it encompassed some forty languages (and it pioneered the “audio-lingual” method used in classrooms today). But training an army of millions to speak the dozens of languages its men might encounter as they hopped from continent to continent was wholly impractical.

It really would be better if the foreigners could learn English.”

“Churchill took these concerns seriously. In his Harvard speech, he declared his support for Basic, a drastically reduced version of English containing 850 words, only 18 of them verbs (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, see, say, send, may, and will). Basic was English for foreigners. The entire system — grammar and vocabulary — could be printed legibly on one side of a sheet of paper, with space left over for sample sentences.”

“As Roosevelt had intuited, dehydrated English was surprisingly difficult to use. Native English speakers struggled mightily to restrict themselves to Basic’s 850 approved words. Foreigners, for their part, were baffled by Basic’s tortuous circumlocutions, particularly around verbs.”

“When the rules of the international aviation system were agreed upon in 1944, a standard language was chosen for international flights. It was, not surprisingly, English.

This wasn’t a choice made because of a desire to turn the world Anglophone. It was made from necessity: there had to be one language, and the United States at that point was responsible for nearly 70 percent of the world’s passenger miles.

Non-English speakers chafed at this. In the 1970s, Francophones in Quebec sought to use French in the air for local flights when convenient. They weren’t demanding that French be the main language of the skies, just that it be an option. Yet pilots and air traffic controllers fought back. They were generally of a global ilk and had adapted themselves to English. They went on strike, crippling aviation in Canada for nine days until the government agreed to prohibit French in the air.”

“In the first decade and a half following the Second World War, 55 percent of the Nobel Prizes in science went to scholars at U.S. universities, and 76 percent of laureates were at Anglophone ones. By the 1960s, more than half of publications on natural science in the world were in English.

Again, a tipping point was reached. With half of the publications in English and more than half of the Nobel laureates speaking it, what were the odds that Interlingua or any other language could hold out? Scientists from non-Anglophone countries had to learn English to read cutting-edge scholarship in their field. Increasingly, they had to write in it, too. The proportion of scientific publications in English shot up as more and more non-Anglophone scientists made the switch. Today it is well over 90 percent.”

“The Internet was invented in the United States and has been disproportionately Anglophone ever since. In 1997 a survey of language distribution found that 82.3 percent of randomly chosen websites, from all over the world, were in English.

It’s not just that English users dominate the internet. The medium itself favors English. Its programming languages are derived from English, so anyone seeking to master Python, C++, or Java-to name three popular coding languages —will have a much easier time if they speak English.

Residing at a deeper level are the encoding schemes that translate bits (ones and zeroes) into characters. The encoding most frequently used in the early days of the internet was ASCIl, a scheme designed to support Eng-lish. ASCII makes no provision for non-roman languages such as Arabic and Hindi. It can’t even handle frequently used symbols in European languages, such as o, ü, B, or ñ. ASCIl nudges everything toward English.

Today there are more accommodating encodings, covering languages from Cherokee to Cuneiform, but they aren’t universally supported. That means there’s no guarantee that a non-English email or text will display correctly. Web addresses are still nearly all in ASCI, which is why the most popular website in China is accessed by typing baidu.com, not 百度.中文网.And even if it did have a Chinese web address, users would still have to use QWERTY keyboards — the global standard, designed in New York around the English alphabet — to type it.”

“What’s remarkable about English is that it’s the language with the most nonnative speakers. Estimates vary widely, but it seems that roughly one in four humans on the planet can now speak it. That number appears to be growing.”

“In South Korea, parents alert to this dynamic have sent their young children, usually under the age of five, to clinics for lingual frenectomies, surgery to cut the thin band of tissue under the tongue. The operation ostensibly gives children nimbler tongues, making it easier for them to pronounce the difficult l and r sounds.”

“While everyone else pays the cognitive tax of learning English, English speakers can dispense with language classes entirely. In 2013 the Modern Language Association found that college and university enrollments in foreign languages were half what they had been fifty years earlier. In other words, U.S. students have responded to globalization by learning half as many languages.”

Conclusion

“The resulting scenario was surreal, half Heart of Darkness, half Salvador Dali. At the very least, it would make a striking diorama: four Hawaiians eating out of crates, waiting for a famous aviator who would never arrive on a tiny, poisoned island that was littered with guano, crab vomit, and dead rats. And the Stars and Stripes flapping crisply in the breeze.”

“Large colonies could hope for self-sufficiency and launch nationalist movements to seize it. Small ones could not. For them, as Luis Muñoz Marin had observed, independence might mean economic suicide. And for places as small as Guam or the U.S. Virgin Islands, to stage armed revolutions would be actual suicide.

Similar calculations ran on the other side of the equation. Synthetics, international standardization, and the technologies of movement had alleviated the pressure on rich countries to colonize, since colonial products became both less necessary and easier to get through international (rather than imperial) trade. But geopolitics did not entirely vanish. Great powers still played games on the maps. It’s just that with the advent of planes and wireless, they no longer needed to bother with difficult-to-hold populated colonies, as they had in Captain Mahan’s day. They could focus instead on small pockets of control.”

“The same dynamic prevailed in Japan. The United States occupied the main islands until 1952 but continued to hold strategically useful outer islands for far longer. It kept Iwo Jima until 1968, Okinawa until 1972. Even today, with Okinawa back in Japanese hands, the U.S. military still dominates its landscape. “The military doesn’t have bases on Okinawa,” a naval officer has explained. “The island itself is the base.””

“Gojira, the phenomenally popular film Tanaka and Honda made, was about an ancient dinosaur awakened by U.S. hydrogen bomb testing. Gojira first destroys a Japanese fishing boat — a thinly veiled Lucky Dragon — before attacking and irradiating a Bikini-like island called Odo. Gojira, who is said to be “emitting high levels of H-bomb radiation,” then turns on Tokyo, breathing fire and laying waste to the city.

As films go, Gojira isn’t subtle. It’s full of talk of bombs and radiation. “If nuclear testing continues, then some-day, somewhere in the world, another Gojira may appear” are its somber final words.

That message, however, got lost in translation. Gojira was remixed for the United States, using much of the original footage but splicing in a white, English-speaking protagonist played by Raymond Burr. What got cut out was the antinuclear politics. The Hollywood version contains only two muted references to radiation. And it ends on a much happier note: “The menace was gone,” the narrator concludes. “The world could wake up and live again.”

The Japanese Gojira was a protest film, hammering away at the dangers of the U.S. testing in the Pacific. The English-language Godzilla, by contrast, was just another monster flick.”

“Greenlanders’ protests counted less with the Danish government than those of Copenhageners. When Washington’s gaze fell on the village of Thule as a base site, the Danish government obliged by removing the indigenous Inughuit community there. The Inughuits were dropped off unceremoniously with blankets, tents, and the very best of wishes in “New Thule,” some sixty-five miles north.

The virtue of Thule was that it was close enough to the Soviet Union that from there, the United States could lob missiles over the North Pole at Moscow. The drawback was that the Soviets could fire missiles back. The Soviet premier warned Denmark that to allow the United States to house its arsenal at Thule — or anywhere on Danish soil — would be “tantamount to suicide.” Nervous Danish politicians incorporated a “no-nuclear” principle into the platform of their governing coalition: the United States could have its base, but no nukes.

Despite this, Washington pressed the issue. When the Danish prime minister didn’t explicitly object, U.S. officials took his silence for winking consent and secretly moved nuclear weapons to Thule.”

“The next year, a B-52 flying near Thule with four Mark 28 hydrogen bombs crashed, hard.

The plane plowed into the ice at more than five hundred miles an hour, leaving a trail of debris five miles long. Nearly a quarter million pounds of jet fuel ignited, setting off the conventional explosives in all four bombs. Those bombs were supposedly “one-point safe,” meaning that the explosives around the core could go off without detonating the bomb, so long as they didn’t go off simultaneously (which would violently compress the core and trigger nuclear fission). Yet some bombs in the arsenal had proved not to be one-point safe, and a lot could go wrong in a crash, especially with weapons that fell below today’s safety standards, such as those at Thule.

The accident at Thule didn’t set off a nuclear explosion. It did, however, spew plutonium all over the crash site. The air force scrambled to clean up the mess before the ice thawed and carried radioactive debris into the ocean. The recovered waste filled seventy-five tankers.

Had an accident of that scale happened over a city, it would have been mayhem.

Could that have happened? Yes. The Thule plane crashed on Greenland, one of the world’s most sparsely populated landmasses. But the same airborne alert system carried planes over one of the most densely populated landmasses, Western Europe. Two years before the Thule accident, a B-52 crashed over the Spanish village of Palomares while carrying four hydrogen bombs, each seventy-five times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb.

Part of the plane landed 80 yards from an elementary school, another chunk hit the earth 150 yards from a chapel. The conventional explosives went off in two of the bombs, sowing plutonium dust into the tomato fields for miles.

The third bomb landed intact. But the fourth? It was nowhere to be found. Officials searched desperately for nearly three months. The hunt had “all the makings of a James Bond thriller,” The Boston Globe reported. In fact, it bore an unnerving resemblance to Thunderball, the Bond film about missing nuclear weapons that was dominating the box office at the time. When the military finally found the bomb resting on the seabed, it proudly showed it off for the cameras — the first time the public had seen a hydrogen bomb.”

“More than five thousand well-dressed protesters gathered in the rain at Trafalgar Square. From there, they marched for four days to a nuclear weapons facility in Aldermaston. By the time they reached it, the crowd had grown to around ten thousand.

These numbers weren’t enormous. But the fact that people had turned out at all, in the 1950s, in the heart of NATO country, to protest the logic of the Cold War was impressive. NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT and NO MISSILE BASES HERE, their banners read in sober black and white.

An artist named Gerald Holtom designed a symbol for the Aldermaston march. “I was in despair,” he remembered. He sketched himself “with hands palm out stretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalized the drawing into a line and put a circle around it.”

The lone individual standing helpless in the face of world-annihilating military might — it was “such a puny thing,” thought Holtom. But his creation, the peace symbol, resonated and quickly traveled around the world.”

“MacArthur ruled Japan unabashedly as a dictator. He refused to socialize with the Japanese or even to travel within the country that he was ruling. Instead, he hunkered down in “Little Tokyo,” an unbombed section of central Tokyo that the occupation authorities turned into a command center. From it, MacArthur censored the press, ran the economy, and set the curriculum of the schools.

The Japanese quickly adapted to the new reality. The first postwar bestseller was a thirty-two-page English-language phrase book, which sold millions of copies. Children mastered key phrases such as “give me chocolate” and attached themselves to the legs of wandering GIs. Tens of thousands of women found work as prostitutes. Sex work was, in the early days, one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy.

The occupation lasted six years and eight months. Yet even after it ended, in 1952, nearly two hundred thousand troops remained on more than two thousand base facilities on the Japanese main islands. This kept Japan “bound hand and foot” to the United States, a leading politician charged. Only 18 percent of those polled after the occupation’s end felt unreservedly that Japan was truly independent. There were too many foreign troops still milling around.”

“Killings, rapes, and assaults by the men on the bases were not uncommon. The year after the occupation ended, more than a hundred Japanese died at the hands of U.S. service members. Technically, crimes committed by uniformed perpetrators were subject to trial in Japanese courts. But the Japanese government relinquished jurisdiction in 97 percent of cases in the early years, turning thousands of alleged criminals over to their superior officers for punishment.”

“Those from Japan could be made cheaply and arrive in hours. And so the U.S. military began a shopping spree. From the start of the Korean War to the end of the Vietnam War, Japanese firms took in at least $300 million a year from U.S. purchase orders. At the peak of the Korean War, 1952, it was nearly $800 million.

This was huge. The president of the Bank of Japan called the procurement orders “divine aid.” Japan’s prime minister called them a “gift of the gods.” On the eve of the Korean War, the auto firm Toyota had laid off workers, cut wages, and reduced pensions by half. It was the military contracts that reversed its fortunes. They were, the firm’s president recalled, “Toyota’s salvation.” Toyotas output swelled between three and four times its size in the six years between 1948 and 1954.

Not only did the contracts provide profits, they offered Japanese firms a chance to master U.S. standards-i.e., the standards that were rapidly spreading out all over the world. 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.”

“In the face of the protests, the United States returned Okinawa to Japan in 1972. But it kept the bases. Today, 20 percent of the island is used by the U.S. military.”

“Bin Laden was, in other words, an infrastructure guy. He was essentially running a mujahidin base in Pakistan. In 1988 he formed a small organization to direct the jihad. It was called, fittingly, al-Qaeda al-Askariya (“the Military Base”). Or just al-Qaeda (“the Base”), for short.

Was al-Qaeda a big deal? Not really. It played only a small part in ousting the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. But the experience had taught Bin Laden an important lesson. He’d seen one of the world’s great armies beaten back by a ragtag (though well-funded) guerrilla alliance.

In 1989 the Red Army retreated to Uzbekistan. By 1991, the whole Jenga tower of European communism had come crashing down.

“The myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims,” Bin Laden reflected. And if one superpower could collapse easily, why not another?”

“Within hours of crossing the border, the Iraqi army had reached Kuwait’s capital, attacked the emir’s palace, and set it aflame. Days later, Hussein annexed Kuwait. This gave him control of two-fifths of the world’s oil supply. And it looked very much as if he might invade Saudi Arabia next.”

“King Fahd had agreed to meet with Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, who’d flown to Jeddah a day after the invasion with General Norman Schwarzkopf and the Pentagon’s Paul Wolfowitz in tow. Cheney wanted to reopen Dhahran to the U.S. military. “After the danger is over, our forces will go home,” he promised.

“I would hope so,” Crown Prince Abdullah responded under his breath, in Arabic.

Abdullah was nervous, but King Fahd agreed. “Come with all you can bring,” he told Cheney. “Come as fast as you can.”

“With three hundred thousand seasoned troops, four thousand tanks, and hundreds of combat aircraft, the Iraqi army was the fourth largest in the world (ranking just below the U.S. Army), the Iraqi air force was the sixth largest.”

“Military planners in the Vietnam War had hoped to avoid the ground and triumph through airpower, leveraging the United States’ considerable technological advantages. They sent B-52s on carpet-bombing runs and equipped helicopters with napalm. When trees interfered with the pilots’ views, the crews sprayed them with the defoliant Agent Orange. (“Only we can prevent forests” was their unofficial slogan.)”

“Ten minutes into the attack, much of Iraq’s infrastructural network, including the Baghdad power grid, had been disabled. Within hours, Hussein’s communications were knocked out.

The barrage continued for forty-three days. Fighting an air war over a desert was much easier than fighting one over a jungle, it turned out. Yet the real key was technology. This was the first major conflict where the global positioning system (GPS) was used. That, plus “smart” bombs — some guided by laser, others with built-in navigation systems — yielded stunning results.”

“Washington had worried about exactly this. After the deal to reopen the base was struck, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia had confided to Robert Gates his terror about what would happen if a soldier “inadvertently pissed on a mosque.” Great efforts were taken to prevent friction. The military banned pornography and alcohol, told Christians to wear their crucifixes under their shirts, and took the extraordinary step of helicoptering Jewish service members out to ships anchored in the Gulf for their religious services, lest Saudi complain of rabbis in the Holy Land.”

“For Osama bin Laden, the bases weren’t only an affront to religion, they were maddening hypocrisy. At the behest of his government, Bin Laden had risked his life to oust infidels from the Muslim country of Afghanistan. And now that same government was inviting nonbelievers in? To the land of Mecca and Medina?

“It is unconscionable to let the country become an American colony with American soldiers — their filthy feet roaming everywhere,” he fumed. The United States, he charged, was “turning the Arabian Peninsula into the biggest air, land, and sea base in the region.” At the urging of the nervous Saudi government, Bin Laden left the country, making his way eventually to Afghanistan. But he did not drop the issue. That the U.S. troops stayed in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, in breach of Cheney’s promise, only added fuel to Bin Laden’s fire.

In 1995, a car bomb went off in Riyadh in front of a U.S. training facility. It killed seven people, five from the United States, and wounded thirty-four others. The Saudi government arrested four suspects who confessed that they’d been inspired by Bin Laden. Whether or not he was responsible, he took credit.

The next year, another bomb exploded, this one at a housing facility at Dhahran. Nineteen U.S. Air Force personnel died, and 372 people were wounded. Again, Bin Laden claimed responsibility. It’s genuinely unclear whether he was involved, but someone hated the base enough to bomb it.

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.”

“The Bin Ladens built the bases. A Bin Laden would seek to destroy them.”

“President Clinton ordered Tomahawk missiles fired simultaneously at al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan (Bin Laden was believed to be at one) and at a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that was suspected of having manufactured chemical weapon precursors for al-Qaeda. This was called Operation Infinite Reach.

It was a disaster. Not only was Bin Laden not at the Afghan base, no other al-Qaeda leader was killed. The Sudanese pharmaceutical plant was destroyed, but it is doubtful that it had any role in making chemical weapons. The United States had thus expended nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars’ worth of missiles to kill a dozen or two low-level al-Qaeda members and destroy the factory that made more than half of Sudan’s medicine, including vital antimalarials. Since sanctions against Sudan made importing medicine difficult, this caused an uncounted number of needless deaths — Germany’s ambassador to Sudan guessed “several tens of thousands” — in one of the world’s poorest countries.

The botched missile strikes added to Bin Laden’s fame and gave him rich material for recruitment.”

“This is worth emphasizing. After the 9/11 attacks, “Why do they hate us?” was the constant question. Yet Bin Laden’s motives were neither unknowable nor obscure. September 11 was, in large part, retaliation against the United States for its empire of bases.

Al-Qaeda’s planes operation seems to have been guided by a larger strategy: provoke the United States, draw it into a war in the Middle East, force infidel governments there into crisis (they would have to either accommodate the unpopular occupiers or fight them), and then defeat the United States on the ground, just as the mujahidin had defeated the Soviet Union. But for this to work, Bin Laden needed Washington to send troops, not just shoot a few Tomahawk missiles. He wagered that the resulting war would be a quagmire.

In a way, Bin Laden got lucky with George W. Bush, who had recently succeeded Bill Clinton. Bush could have treated the 9/11 attacks as a crime, arrested the perpetrators, and brought them to justice. Instead, he declared a “war on terror” of global expanse and promised to “rid the world of evil-doers.””

“Stationing forces on Guam, unlike stationing them in Saudi Arabia or Okinawa, did not require negotiating with foreign governments. Nor did Guamanians have congressional representation, as residents of Hawaii did directly or as Puerto Ricans did indirectly through the New York diaspora. When protests imperiled the Okinawa bases, the government proposed transferring some seventeen thousand marines and their dependents to Guam — a decision made without consulting anyone from the island.”

“Whether Guamanians supported the move was irrelevant, as a graduate student who secured an interview with a surprisingly candid air force analyst discovered.

“People on Guam were forgetting that “they are a possession, and not an equal partner,” the analyst explained.

“If California says they want to do this or that, it is like my wife saying that she wants to move here or there: I’ll have to respect her wish and at least discuss it with her. If Guam says they want to do this or that, it is as if this cup here,” he continued, pointing to his coffee mug, “ex- presses a wish: the answer will be, you belong to me and I can do with you as best I please.”

The planned move from Okinawa to Guam has stalled owing to complications on the Okinawan side.”

“In an elongated process stretching from the 1970s to the 1990s, the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was broken up. The Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Palau became sovereign states “freely associated” with the United States, receiving economic assistance in exchange for offering base sites. The Northern Marianas, however, became a commonwealth akin to Puerto Rico. In 1986, when the legislation finally went through, its residents — some thirty thousand people — became U.S. citizens.”

“Saipan functioned as a sort of standing loophole. Starting in 1995, as stories of its exploited workers made their way to the mainland, members of Congress sought to close it. Over the next decade or so, they would submit at least twenty-nine bills to change some part of the relevant law. Twice the Senate voted unanimously for wage and immigration reforms, only to have the bills die in the House Committee on Resources. A 1999 House bill had 243 cosponsors, a substantial majority. But it, too, died.

The Northern Marianas government and the garment manufacturers, it turned out, had hired a lobbyist to defend their lucrative arrangement. A really, really good lobbyist. He offered junkets to every Congress member and congressional aide who wanted to visit Saipan — more than 150 went. The visitors enjoyed golfing, luxurious hotels, snorkeling, and, in some cases, the services of prostitutes (some of the guest workers on Saipan were driven by poverty into sex work, others were forced into it outright).

A private firm couldn’t have easily offered such all-expenses-paid trips to lawmakers. But, the lobbyist explained, “one of the grand constitutional loopholes we had used to our advantage for years was the provision that when a ‘government’ pays for travel — or, in fact, confers any gift or gratuity — representatives and staff are not required to report those expenses.”

So, for the purposes of labor law, the Northern Marianas wasn’t part of the United States. For the purposes of trade, it was. And for the purposes of lobbying regulations, it was a foreign government.

Nearly half the Republican members of the House Committee on Resources went to Saipan or sent staffers there.”

“For the lobbyist, this was a triumph. Despite the overwhelming opposition (two unanimous Senate votes), he’d arranged enough golf rounds and snorkeling trips to keep the loophole open for more than a decade. It was the first in a string of legally creative maneuvers that would turn him into Washington’s highest-paid lobbyist — “The Man Who Bought Washington,” Time called him — and a household name.

That name? Jack Abramoff.

For the top-earning lobbyist in Washington, Abramoff had an odd portfolio. He didn’t represent Fortune 500 companies. Instead, he worked the loopholes. His next victory after the Northern Marianas was for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who were fighting off a gaming tax. He used the same strategy as in Saipan, exploiting the fact that an Indian tribal government could give politicians unreported gifts. He took on more Indian tribes and nations as clients. He started representing a Puerto Rican business group. He organized junkets to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and he got involved in Guam’s gubernatorial race.”

“Abramoff was convicted of conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion for his numerous shady dealings, most notably defrauding the Native American tribes that had hired him. His malfeasance filled a 373-page report authored by the incensed chairman of the Senate’s Indian Affairs Committee, John McCain. Or, as Abramoff called him, “my hangman.”

Skewering the country’s most notorious lobbyist showed McCain in a flattering light. That, in turn, helped his presidential bid. In 2008, campaigning on his reputation for integrity, he won the Republican nomination.

But McCain had his own empire problems. The son of a naval officer, McCain had been born not on the mainland, but in the Panama Canal Zone. He hadn’t lived there long, but his birthplace nevertheless raised questions. There’d never been a president born in a territory.

Was McCain even eligible for the office?

The Constitution requires that the president be a “natural born citizen,” yet it’s not clear what that means. At minimum, everyone agrees, it means the president must be a citizen from birth. But does “natural born” include those born in territories where citizenship is statutory rather than constitutional? The Supreme Court has never weighed in.”

“In the 1930s, Congress addressed this issue. As a House report put it, “the citizenship of persons born in the Canal Zone of American parents, has never been defined either by the Constitution, treaty or congressional enactment.” After debate, Congress passed a statute making them citizens. It applied not only to future children but, retroactively, to anyone who’d been born in the Canal Zone to a citizen parent in the past. The law passed in 1937.

John McCain was born in 1936.

Had this been litigated, it would have made for fascinating case law. McCain was, per the 1937 statute, a citizen by virtue of his birth. But he wasn’t born a citizen, as no law made him a citizen at the time of his birth. Arguably, then, he was not a “natural born citizen” and thus not eligible for the presidency.”

“Obama’s perceived foreignness rankled some in Clinton’s base. After Obama clinched the nomination, her supporters began to fantasize that he might be disqualified by the “natural born citizen” clause. They circulated an anonymous email claiming that he was born in Kenya.”

“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.”