“How to Hide an Empire”: Daniel Immerwahr on the History of the Greater United States

this is democracy now democraticnow.org the war and peace report I'm Amy Goodman with Juan González how to

hide

an

empire

a

history

of the greatest United States that's the title of an impressive new book that looks at a part of the U.S. The nation's often overlooked overseas territories, from Puerto Rico to Guam, former territories like the Philippines and its hundreds of military bases scattered around the world. The historian Daniel Innovar writes in his new book that on several occasions the inhabitants of the American Empire have been shot, bombed, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented with what they have not been in general, it is seen, writes Daniel M revoir es associate professor of

history

at Northwestern University in Chicago, joins us from Chicago, welcome to Democracy.

Now it's great to have you with us, why don't you get started? with the title how to

hide

an

empire

, how it's done and what it means a history of the great United States, yes, when a lot of people think of the United States, people who live in the continental US, people outside the United States They think of the adjoining patch as a familiar shape, but of course those aren't the country's borders and they've only really been the country's borders for three years of American history, so what I tried to do was write a history of the United States of the entire area over which the United States claims jurisdiction, but what I discovered while writing that was how often people on the continent and often political leaders had an inaccurate view of the borders of their own country or at least they had a very clear idea.

I had the feeling that the contiguous part of the United States, the

states

, were the part that mattered and the territories were sort of peripheral that were often considered and not fully understood and allowed to be diminished as sacrifice zones or, well, You know, places that could be used for medical experiments and something like that, so my goal is to try to tell the story of the US with the entire territory as part of the story. Well, Professor Emma, ​​one of the things she raised is that the issue of creating a pirate man didn't really begin. when most of the stories talk about it with the Spanish-American War of 1898, but in reality they talk about colonization throughout the West and it is noted that the Constitution does not have much to say about what happens with the territories that are not

states

, except for the territorial clause, but that the Northwest Ordinance played an important role in shaping how the United States would expand.

Could you talk about that? Yes, of course, the name of the country from the beginning was the United States of America, but from day one. of the country's history from the first day the United States received its independence from Great Britain, it was not a union of states, it was an amalgamation of states and territories, there was not much guidance in the Constitution on what to do. with the territories, but are ultimately under the power of Congress. The Northwest Ordinance established a pattern by which territories could be promoted to States, but two things were notable about that pattern, firstly, to be able to be promoted to States in accordance with the Northwest Ordinance they had. be populated by white people, so the idea was that the non-white populations within them wouldn't really count and it wasn't until the territories, mind you Putman, were sufficiently populated by white people that they would be accepted as States, the other really important thing.

What we must realize is that it is only a guide. Congress can do whatever it wants and has done whatever it wants. It has kept territories away from statehood often for decades. Oklahoma took more than a century before becoming a state and has generally promoted others to statehood quickly. just as a way of curating the borders of the country to decide who's in and who's out and you mentioned that Oklahoma there was an attempt in the early 1900s to create a state called Sequoia in parts of what is now Oklahoma, talk about that. and the reason that never happened, that's right, Oklahoma used to be called Indian Country or Indian Territory, that was its legal name and that territory used to be a whopping 46 percent of the country when it was initially established and then it shrank pretty quickly. . to the borders of present-day Oklahoma and right at the end of this process, somewhat compressed, you know, a group of various Indian political entities try to create a state out of what was then Oklahoma and called Sequoia, it would not be an entirely Indian state . state or every Native American state would be mixed, but their hope was that they would at least have enough population to have a ruling majority within it, they applied for statehood, were rejected for statehood, and instead Sequoia was absorbed into the state of white majority.

Professor Innovar from Oklahoma talks about why you start with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and you take us through what are now called various things, but territories, what we call colonies and the language changed, but it starts with Pearl Harbor, yeah, It is such an extraordinary moment because it is one of the most familiar moments in American history and when most people in America think of Pearl Harbor, what they think is that Japan attacked the United States and attacked it by bombing Pearl Harbor. and that brought the United States into the war and That was the only time that the United States was attacked directly in the war but of course what really happened is that Japan wasn't just attacking Hawaii.

Japan was launching an attack against the United States as Pacific territories, as well as the British Pacific territories. in Thailand, so in an almost simultaneous attack, this all happened in a matter of hours, the Japanese attacked the Philippines, Guam Wake Island and Hawaii, and the military attack on the Philippines was just as bad as the attack on Hawaii and for that reason initially It was not clear to journalists how. to say what happened if you look at the first newspapers that you know, some of them say that the Japanese attacked the Philippines and Guam, others say that the Japanese attacked the Philippines in Hawaii, that notion that the Philippines in Hawaii had really important objectives to emphasize , that's how it seems. in Eleanor Roosevelt's first speech this is how it appears in a draft of the Pearl Harbor speech that FDR's deputy secretary of state wrote and this is how it appeared in the first draft of FDR's speech emphasizing both objectives, but the surprising thing is that it is you can see FDR going through Thinking about that, thinking about the implications of trying to explain to the country that the Philippines had been attacked and this was caused by the United States going to war and it seems to me that it's clearly a rare problem with that implication to worry If an attack on the Philippines really counts as a cause of war in the United States and we have many opinion polls from the time that suggest that the majority of people who lived in the U.S.

Mainland countries did not want to see the American military came to the defense of the far western territories of the United States, such as the Philippines and Guam, so what FDR did was two things: First, he crossed out prominent references to the Philippines and simply centered them. in Hawaii, which was also a territory, not a state, but had a significantly larger white population and was closer to the mainland, and even then it seems he felt a little nervous about whether Hawaii would count as the United States for purposes. Of you know how to rally the nation to war, and in fact, opinion polls suggest that only 55 percent of the country thought the U.S. military should defend the territory of Hawaii in the event of war, so they inserted the American word in your descriptor so it's not just the Japanese. bomb, as he initially said in his speech, the island of Oahu, but there they bomb the American island of Oahu, so you can see what he is doing, is trying to go around Hawaii to the United States, the Philippines and Guam. disappeared and just took them out of the prominent references in the speech and shoved them back and I think that has a lot to do with why a lot of people in the United States today don't realize that that attack wasn't just in Hawaii. alone and it's a real shame they realize that because the attack on Pearl Harbor was simply an attack that the Japanese never came back from, it was militarily damaging but it didn't result in the invasion of Hawaii, that's not true in the case of the Philippines.

Guam island wakes all of which were attacked all conquered populations were interned the occupation of the Philippines by Japan was an absolutely brutal affair the occupation and subsequent conquest of the Philippines by Usry we believe they killed, you know, maybe a million and a half of people the best we can say is that it is twice the number of people who died in the Civil War, that is the bloodiest event that has ever occurred on American soil and that barely appears in US history textbooks .USA and the Philippines became independent in 1946 from the United States. People in the United States might be surprised to learn that it is so recent.

Yes Yes. I often found that I would talk to people with PhDs in US history and I would just say, "You know," if they didn't study the colonies, I would say you know. Know? what is the largest colony the United States has ever had and what decade did it become independent and a lot of people were scratching their heads because it's not usually emphasized when we talk about the history of the United States, we often talk about the American Empire in a sort of sense wider. and more diffuse sense but design surprisingly many American historians do not have much knowledge about the actual colonies in terms of the independence of the Philippines in 1946, this whole question of which territories became states versus which ones remained territories or became independent really turned and you mentioned in your book, a group of Supreme Court decisions that are rarely studied these days, the insular cases in the early 1900s that determined which were incorporated territories and which were unincorporated, could you talk about that in the meaning ? of those decisions to justify an American Empire, yes, after the United States, in a kind of imperial buying spree, acquired a series of large populated colonies, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, the Supreme Court had to determine where These places were within the fabric of the nation is part of the United States, but does that mean Filipinos can vote for the president?

Does that mean they are covered by the Constitution? It was not clear and there were many arguments about it, so finally the Supreme Court came. Down with this, the Constitution applies to the United States, it is the law of the land, but some of the territories, namely those that have been acquired from Spain, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and this would also extend to Samoa American and later to the US Virgin Islands and other places that were not part of the land, so the Constitution applies to the land, but these are not part of the United States in a constitutional sense and , therefore, they are possessed by the United States there, the United States encompasses them within. its borders, but its constitution does not extend them completely, some of the territories of Hawaii and Alaska that had larger populations of white settlers were considered incorporated, meaning that the constitution would extend to them and that seemed to make them more eligible for the category statehood, but even in those cases, in the early 20th century it was not entirely clear whether Hawaii or Alaska would ever become states, and in fact there was much racist resistance in the continental United States to the idea that the people from Hawaii could become the United States. vote on federal laws in his book, he shows two maps of the United States, one just of the continental United States, the other with all the territories included, the titles read, they told him it was this, but it is this, and he explains the meaning of this and how. this fits into the map of US military bases around the world, the US says there are about 800 military bases abroad, for comparison, Russia has nine, most countries have none, that's correct , so I discovered that when writing this book, first of all, I had to learn. how to make maps because I wanted to see the United States differently than how it had been presented to me.

I grew up in Pennsylvania and at no point in my upbringing did I see a map of the United States that had Puerto Rico on it. Puerto Rico has been part of the United States since 1899 and so I wanted to try to imagine the country differently to see it differently to map it differently and so one thing I did was an equal area projection that shows the entire territory of the United States. United States and what is notable, this map was from 1940. What is notable is how much physical land mass of the United States there was at that time in the overseas territories of Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines and today you can make a map equally surprising of the parts of the United States that The States do notThey take up so much land area today, but the United States controls hundreds of pieces of land on islands in foreign countries and it's very easy not to think about it if you take all that land and mash it up.

It probably adds up to less than the area of ​​Connecticut, it's not a lot of space, but that area is important to both the US military and all the countries and people who live around that land and have to deal with outposts from United States. States that are spread throughout the world. Well, professor, before I wanted to ask you about the chapter in your book entitled Language is a Virus, obviously when countries conquer other peoples who speak different languages, there is a question of what happens to the language and culture of these four of the conquered or absorbed populations and you talk a lot in your books about the subject of the English language and how the absorption of the first French speakers in Louisiana from the native peoples of the Puerto Ricans and the Philippines how the language question began to be addressed, Yes, it is important to recognize that one of the things that empires do is try to impose a kind of homogeneity, they try to export the standards of the homeland to the colonies. and it is often a violent and difficult process, which has certainly been true in the United States and its territories when seeking to export and enforce English.

One of the most dramatic cases of this is in Guam, where we have stories of a naval officer who went around burning all the English dictionaries of tomorrow as a way of trying to eradicate the local language and enforce English and there are all kinds of stories from, you know, various colonial subjects who were forcibly transferred to the English language, only schools were physically punished if they spoke their native language. than English, what's really interesting about this is not only the way that the United States has done, as many empires have done, to try to impose its language on its colonies, but that the United States has actually had remarkable success in impose their language outside their colonies - after World War II the history of the last 50 years has led to the remarkable spread of the English language not only in places that the United States is physically controlled but in very distant places that it has not controlled .

I wanted to talk about one of the people you focus on in your book as a way of talking about colonialism. Cornelius Rhodes, the doctor, the cancer researcher who went to San Juan Puerto Rico to study anemia in the 1930s, tells us what he did there and how He ascended from there, that's right, Cornelius Rhodes was working for the Rockefeller Institute and was to San Juan in the 1930s to research anemia. Many Puerto Ricans suffered from anemia as a result of hookworms and he took his, you know, he had been trained at Harvard, but suddenly, when he came to San Juan, he became a different kind of doctor.

He took over his location in Puerto Rico and has a kind of license to do whatever he wanted however he wanted, so this is what we have accounts of in the first place. He refused to treat some of his patients just to see what would happen. He tried to induce illness in others again to see what would happen by restricting his own diet. He referred to his patients to his colleagues as experimental animals and then wrote a letter. down and he wrote a letter in which he told a colleague in Boston. I told him, "You know Puerto Rico is beautiful, the weather is amazing, I love the islands, however the problem is with the Puerto Ricans, they are horrible, they still are." disgusting and what you really have to do is totally exterminate the population and then he said and I started that I have killed eight of my patients and I have tried to transplant cancer to thirteen more, I hope you do well in Boston.

He is sincere and just signed, we know that because he later omitted the letter, it was discovered by the Puerto Rican staff at the hospital where he worked and became a national scandal, understandably, the Puerto Ricans said they heard the contempt of the mainlanders. He had heard about the problem of Puerto Rican overpopulation and how mainlanders disapproved of it, but here they saw what they interpreted as the racist, homicidal intent of a doctor who had actually killed eight people. Cornelius Rhodes abandoned, he simply fled the islands waiting, presumably, what happens in San Juan stays in San Juan the government did an investigation and discovered another letter that the governor considered worse than the first but the governor who was appointed governor who is a continental that has been appointed and not elected suppress that letter we don't have We know that the investigator ever saw it or found it and concluded, after having suppressed the evidence, that Cornelius Rhodes probably did not kill eight of his patients, he was probably just joking or something and Cornelius Rhodes never faced a hearing, not only was he never even fired, so he returned to New York, continued his work, quickly became vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine and then, during the World War II, he became an Army colonel and he became a medical director in the chemical warfare service, so that's not just a promotion, just think about what that allows you to do because the chemical warfare service is preparing the United States to enter into a gas war if the time comes, to be able to do so. test all types of poison gas first on animals, goats are preferred, but finally on uniformed human subjects, men who don't have much informed consent, whether applying mustard agents to their skin to see how they blister their skin in gas chambers with gas.

The masks only see how long they can stay there, they are locked there only until they fail or in many cases there is an island that the United States uses off the island of San Jose in Panama and the men are put in the field and they . They are asked to stage mock battles, but as they do, they are gassed from above and then they know that this is to see how they are affected and interestingly, Professor Innovar, there were many Puerto Ricans who served in World War II who ended up. Stationed in Panama and being subjected to some of the mustard panting experiments that were carried out at that time, I know this because one of my uncles who served in the 65th Infantry who was in Panama and was subjected to those experiments, so en However, what is interesting is that Cornelius Rhodes remained an important figure in the medical world, and until recently or in recent years there has been an attempt to review or reform the image of him in the medical world. community, that is exactly the case, after overseeing these medical gas experiments in which 60,000 uniformed personnel, many of them Puerto Ricans, were subjected without informed consent to chemical weapons and many of them suffered debilitating effects as a result of this emphysema, eye damage, genital scars, psychological damage.

Some of these men were actually harmed by this, however that didn't stop him either and in fact some of that work with chemical agents alerted him, as well as other doctors, to the possibility that mustard agents could be used to treat cancer. Cornelius Rhodes took some of the US surplus stock of chemical weapons after the war and became the first director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute and then used his position to launch, you know, the turn towards chemotherapy and tested substance after substance after substance in the fight against cancer. The incredible thing is that in the US medical community that's why he was remembered because he appeared on the cover of Time magazine there was an award given by the American Association of Cancer Research after Cornelius Rhodes and that war award was given for more 20 years earlier a Puerto Rican cancer researcher pointed out to the AACR, you know the guy after whom this award is named, the hero Cornelius Rhodes, you know what he did in Puerto Rico and 23 years had passed, the information segregation had been so extraordinary It's been 23 years before the mainland medical community realized that the guy they had been enthusiastically braiding cells.

Yes, I did at least say in the letter that he killed eight of his patients, the medical community got the memo and the award was changed and there is now an understanding of his double legacy, but what is extraordinary to me is how long he got away with it. his own, how long he could and with how many Puerto Ricans he could experiment in some of the worst ways imaginable without facing the consequences of that. So, as we talk about Puerto Rico, let's talk about this issue of the language used, moving language from colonies to territories and even when Donald Trump is speaking, when President Trump is speaking, how he refers to those in these territories, I mean places like Puerto Rico, when in your book you talk about the Constitution or Guantánamo and Cuba being outside the Constitution, you are talking about how this is clearly something that one has known all one's life, but there is not even a jury trial in Puerto Rico, There is a constitutional right to trial by jury, it does not apply to Puerto Rico, so I am from Pennsylvania, but if I traveled to San Juan, I would lose that right when I arrived in Puerto Rico, and that issue of changing the language of colonies to talk about them as territories, the leadership. of the United States understanding what the language means and President Trump referring to, for example, Puerto Rico and some amazing quotes about Puerto Rico, yes, let's talk about that, so that when the United States initially acquires most of its overseas territories, those Leaders of the American people, such as Teddy Roosevelt Woodrow Wilson, refer to the territories in a very direct way;

They are called colonies because, of course, that is what they are and these men are outspoken defenders of the empire and they are very proud and happy to call the overseas possessions the colonies of the United States, but that doesn't last long around the circa 1910s you see government officials getting very nervous about the c-word and trying to replace it with euphemisms so that territory is a softer term legally, it doesn't exist. an important distinction in US law, but it is a term that at least you know seems to be in line with the structure of the United States.

Kansas has been a territory. Montana and has been a territory and are states, so the practice in the United States has been since then. early 20th century to refer to overseas parts of the United States as territories rather than colonies, but still there is a clear sense on the part of US leaders that those places don't really fit the country and Trump He's not the first person to say things, but as with so many things, he says the quiet parts out loud, so after the hurricane damage, Hurricanes Irma and Maria damaged Puerto Rico, you know, Trump had to talk about This, he does something extraordinary. where when he addresses Puerto Rico he refers to it in the second person, so I hate to break it to you Berto Rico, but now you have ruined our budget, of course, Puerto Rico is part of the United States.

Puerto Ricans have been citizens for more than However, after a century, it is very clear in Trump's mind that there is a homeland that is the kind of place where you can build a wall around the contiguous United States and then there are those other parts of the United States that seemed foreign to him, another really good one. An example of this is after a federal judge in Hawaii blocked Trump's Muslim travel ban. Jeff Sessions expressed his astonishment that a judge sitting on a Pacific island could block the president, of course, that has to do with the notion that Hawaii is not really part of the United States, well, and speaking of the Pacific Islands , we talk about the specifications of land on these islands and these territories where sometimes they are not even people but yet they are critical or important to the United States and have strategic value to our territories considered to be the United States.

United States, yes, I think it's important to remember that the United States has inhabited territories, it has five of them, but it also has many other lands, including uninhabited ones, and that is, in fact, the first American territory. Entry to Overseas Empire The familiar boundaries of the United States, the ones you picture in your mind when you think of the country, were finally completed in 1854 with the Gadsden Purchase, but three years later, the United States began to claim overseas territory in the form of uninhabited islands, in this case they were called guano islands because they were a type of islands on which birds perched and deposited feces for centuries that piled up more and more and dried in the sun and were an incredibly source useful as fertilizer, so in the search for this fertilizer the United States claimed almost a hundred guano islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, you know that they served as fertilizer and not much else in the 19th century, but in the 20th century it turned out that the same characteristics of those islands that made them attractive to birds, small islands in the middle of an oceanic desert, good places to land also made them very useful for airplanes, so the United StatesIt has reused some of those islands as military bases, as places to store nuclear weapons, as places to land.

He was on his way to one of those guano islands. Howland Island was where Amelia Earhart's plane crashed and that makes sense. Howland Island is apparently nowhere, you know next to nothing, it's a remote island in the Pacific, but if you're trying to fly a plane. Along the Pacific, having Howland Island is really important. Well, we hear a lot about China trying to build an extended runway on small islands off the coast of China, but the United States has been doing this around the world for decades and decades. It is not like this? So I think if you characterized the United States as a territorial empire today, I think you could call it a kind of pointillist empire in the sense that it consists primarily of islands and bases, just little points where the United States can move. stages, things can put, transceivers can store things and China is taking a page from that book.

China doesn't have the same territorial extent that the United States has, it doesn't have the same kind of history in the 20th century, you know, coming to claim everything. these islands, then China is doing something really interesting: it is making its own islands, it is actually creating artificial islands that serve the same purpose and that can be used as little points like military bases as a way for China to extend its influence by having these little. specks of dirt and finally we only have 30 seconds, but from the Beatles to the peace symbol they explain their connection with the colonies and the anti, so it turns out that these pieces of land not only do not matter to the American military, but also They matter a lot to the people who have lived around them and what I discovered in my book was that both the peace symbol and the Beatles are in some ways artifacts of the US base system. reaction to the fear of US military bases and the Beatles as a band, they grew up in the shadow of the largest US group air force base in Europe we want to thank you very much Daniel M revoir for joining us associate professor of history at Northwestern University his new book how to hide an empire a history of the great United States and that does it for our program Democracy Now is produced by Mike Burke Dina Guster nermeen Shaikh Carla Will's Tammy Warren de Sam al Kahf John Hamilton Robbie Karen honey Massoud Trina Dorota Maria studio and Livie drainer Mike Dippolito Miguel Almaguer engineer special thanks to Becca Staley Julie Crosby I'm Amy Goodman with Juan González thank you very much for joining us