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

this is democracy now democracynow.org the war and peace report I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez how to hide an empire a history of the greater United States that's the title of a stunning new book looking at a part of the USA is often overlooked the nation's overseas territories from Puerto Rico to Guam former territories like the Philippines and it's hundreds of military bases scattered across the globe historian Daniel innovar writes in his new book at various times the inhabitants of the US Empire have been shot shelled starved intern dispossessed tortured and experimented on what they haven't been by and large is seen he writes Daniel M revoir is associate professor of history at Northwestern University in Chicago he joins us from Chicago welcome to Democracy Now it's great to have you with us why don't you start with the title how to hide an empire how do you do it and what a history of the greater United States means yeah so when a lot of people think about the United States people who live in the US mainland people outside of the United States they think of the contiguous blob it's a familiar shape but of course those aren't the borders of the country and actually they've only been the borders of the country for three years of US history so what I tried to do was write a history of the greater United States of the full area over which the United States claims jurisdiction but what I found as I was writing that was how frequently people on the mainland and often political leaders had an inaccurate view of their own country's borders or at least had a very clear sense that the contiguous part of the United States the states was the part that mattered and the territories were sort of peripheral often regarded and not fully understood and and left to dwindle as sacrifice zones or you know places that could be used for medical experiments and that sort of thing so my goal is to try to tell US history with all the territory as part of the story well professor Emma for one of the things that you raised is that really the question of the the creation of a man pirate did not really begin when it's most histories talk about it with the spanish-american war of 1898 but you earlier into the colonization across the West really and you note that the Constitution doesn't have a whole lot to say about what happens to territories that are not States except for the territorial clause but that the Northwest Ordinance played a big role in shaping how the United States would expand could you talk about that yes sure so the name of the country from the get-go was the United States of America but from the first day of the country's history from the first day when the United States received its independence from Britain it wasn't a union of states it was an amalgamation of states and territories there wasn't a lot of guidance in the Constitution about what was to be done with the territories but ultimately they're under the power of Congress Northwest Ordinance set a pattern whereby territories could be upgraded to States but two things were notable about that pattern first of all in order to be upgraded to States according to the Northwest Ordinance they had to be populated by white people so the idea was that non-white populations within them wouldn't really count and it wasn't until the territories beware Putman were sufficiently populated by white people that they would be accepted as States the other really important thing to realize is that's just a guidance Congress can do whatever it wants and it has done whatever it wants it has held territories back from statehood often for decades Oklahoma took more than a century before it became a state and it has promoted others to statehood quickly usually just as a way of sort of curating the borders of the country of deciding who's in and who's out and you mentioned Oklahoma there was an attempt or in the early nineteen hundred's to create a state called Sequoia in parts of what is now Oklahoma talk about that and the reason why that never happened that's right so Oklahoma used to be called Indian country or Indian Territory that was its legal name and that territory used to be enormous 46 percent of the country when it was initially established and then it was fairly quickly whittled down into the borders of present-day Oklahoma and right at the end of this process sort of compressed you know group of various Indian polities try to create a state out of what was then he start Oklahoma and called Sequoia it wouldn't be an all Indian state or all Native American state it would be mixed but their hope was that at least they'd have a sufficient population to have a governing majority within it they applied for statehood they were rejected for statehood and instead Sequoia was absorbed into the white majority state of Oklahoma professor innovar talk about why you begin with the bombing of Pearl Harbor and take us through what are now called well various things but territories what we're called colonies and the language changed but start with Pearl Harbor yeah it's such an extraordinary moment because it's one of the most familiar moments in US history and when most people of the United States think about Pearl Harbor what they think about is Japan attacked the United States and it attacked it by bombing Pearl Harbor and that drew the United States into the war and that was the only time that the United States was directly attacked in the war but of course what actually happened is it wasn't just Hawaii that Japan was attacking Japan was launching an attack on the United States as Pacific territories as well as Britain's Pacific territories in Thailand so in a near simultaneous attack this all happened within hours the Japanese attacked the Philippines Guam Wake Island and Hawaii and the attack on the Philippines militarily was just as bad as the attack on Hawaii and for that reason it was unclear to reporters initially how to say what happened if you look at the early newspapers that you know some of them say the Japanese attack Philippines and Guam others say Japanese attacked the Philippines in Hawaii that notion that the Philippines in Hawaii were there really important targets to emphasize that's how it appears in Eleanor Roosevelt's first speech that's how it appears in a draft of the Pearl Harbor speech that FDR's Undersecretary of state wrote and that's how it appeared in FDR's own first draft of the speech emphasizing both targets but what's amazing is that you can see FDR going through thinking through that thinking through the implications of trying to explain to the country that the Philippines had been attacked and this was caused for the United States to go to war and it seems to me that he's quite clearly uncommon trouble with that implication worrying whether an attack on the Philippines really count as a cause for war in the United States and we have a lot of opinion polls from the time which suggest that most people who were living in the u.s. mainland's didn't want to see the US military come to the defense of the far western territories of the United States like the Philippines and Guam so what FDR did is two things first of all he crossed out prominent references to the Philippines and just focused it on Hawaii who I was also a territory not a state but it had significantly larger white population and it was closer to the mainland and then even then it seems like he felt a little nervous that about whether Hawaii would count as the United States for the purposes of you know rallying the nation to war and indeed opinion polls suggest that only 55 percent of the country thought the US military should defend the territory of Hawaii in the case of war so he inserted the word American in his descriptor so it's not just the Japanese bomb as it initially said in his speech the island of Oahu but there they bomb the american island of oahu so you can see what he's doing is trying to round Hawaii up to American and the Philippines and Guam he kind of regards is you know too far gone and just takes them out from prominent references of the speech and tucks them in the 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 was not just on Hawaii alone and it's a real pity that they'll realize it because the attack on Pearl Harbor was just that it was an attack the Japanese never came back it was militarily damaging but it didn't result in Hawaii being invaded that's not true of the Philippines Guam awake island all of which were attacked all of which were conquered populations were interned the occupation of the Philippines by Japan was an absolutely brutal affair the occupation and the subsequent Usry conquest of the Philippines we think killed you know maybe a million and a half people as best we can tell which is to you know two times the number of people who died in the Civil War that's the bloodiest event that ever happened on US soil and that's barely in the US history textbooks and the Philippines became independent in 1946 from the United States people might be surprised to know it's so recent yeah yeah 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'd say you know do you know what the largest colony that the United States has held and what decade it became independent and I got a lot of people who were scratching their heads because it's not usually emphasized when we talk about US history we often talk about US Empire in a sort of broader and more diffuse sense but design surprisingly a lot of US historians don't have a lot of knowledge about the actual colonies themselves well in terms of the the independence of the Philippines in 1946 this whole issue of which territories became States versus which either were held as territories or became independent really pivoted around and you mentioned it 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 versus unincorporated territories could you talk about that in the significance of those decisions for the justifying an American Empire yeah so after the United States in a sort of Imperial shopping spree acquired a number of large populated colonies the Philippines Puerto Rico Hawaii Guam the Supreme Court had to figure out where these places stood within the fabric of the nation they're part of the United States but does that mean Filipinos can vote for the president does that mean they're covered by the Constitution it wasn't clear and there were a lot of arguments about it so the Supreme Court ultimately came down with this that the Constitution applies to the United States it's the law of the land's but some of the territories namely the ones that have been acquired from Spain so Puerto Rico Guam Philippines and this would also extend to American Samoa and later to the US Virgin Islands and other other places that those were not part of the land's so the Constitution applies to the land but these are not part of the United States in a constitutional sense and therefore they're possessed by the United States there the united states encompasses them within its borders but its constitution doesn't fully extend to them some of the territories hawaii and alaska which had larger white settler populations were deemed to be incorporated meaning that on the constitution would extend to them and that seemed to make them more eligible for statehood but even in those cases it wasn't entirely clear in the early part of the 20th century that Hawaii or Alaska would ever become States and in fact there was a lot of racist resistance in the US mainland to the notion that people from Hawaii might get to vote on federal laws in your book you show two maps of the United States one of just the mainland United States the other with all of the territories included the captions read they told you it was this but it's this and explain the significance of this and how this fits into the map of US military bases around the world the US says what something like around 800 overseas military bases by comparison Russia has nine most countries have none that's right so I found that in writing this book well first of all I had to learn how to make maps because I wanted to see the United States differently than I'd been had to present it to me I grew up in Pennsylvania and no point in my education 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 just try to imagine the country differently to see it differently to map it differently and so I did one thing I did was an equal area projection showing all the territory of the United States and what's remarkable this map was from 1940 what's remarkable is how much just physical land mass of the United States was at that point in overseas territories Alaska Hawaii the Philippines and you can do a similarly surprising map today the parts of the United States that are not States don't take up as much land area today but the United States controls hundreds of specks of land on Islands in foreign countries and it's really easy not to think about that if you take all that land and you mash it all together it probably adds up to less than the area of Connecticut it's not a lot of space but boy is that land area important both for the US military and also for all the countries and people live right around that land and have to deal with outposts of the United States that are peppered throughout the world well professor before I wanted to ask you about the chapter in your book titled language is a virus obviously when countries conquer other peoples who speak different languages there's an issue of what what happens to the language and the culture of these four of the of the conquered or absorbed populations and you talk in in your books much on the issue of the English language and how the absorption first of French speaking French speakers in Louisiana of the native peoples of the Puerto Ricans and the Philippines how the language issue began to be dealt with yeah it's an important thing to recognize that one of the things that empires do is they try to enforce a sort of homogeneity they try to export the standards of the motherland's on to the colonies and often that's a violent and difficult process certainly that's been true in the United States and its territories as its sought to export and enforce English one of the more dramatic instances of this is on Guam where we have accounts of a naval officer who went around burning all English tomorrrow dictionaries as a way to try to extirpate the local language and enforce English and there's all kinds of accounts of you know various colonial subjects being you know forcibly moved on to English language only schools being physically punished if they speak their native language rather than English what's really interesting about that however is not only the way that the United States has done as many empires have done to try to enforce its language is in its colonies but that actually the United States has been remarkably successful in enforcing its language outside of its colonies - after World War Two the history of the last 50 so has you know given rise to the remarkable spread of the English language not just in places that the United States is physically controlled but in far distant places that it hasn't controlled I wanted to talk about one of the people you focus on in your book as a way to talk about colonialism Cornelius Rhodes the doctor the cancer researcher who went to San Juan Puerto Rico to study anemia in the 1930s tell us what he did there and how he ascended from there that's right so Cornelius Rhodes was working for the Rockefeller Institute and he went to San Juan in the 1930s to research anemia a lot of Puerto Ricans were suffering from anemia as a result of hookworm and he took his you know he'd been trained in Harvard but suddenly when he got to San Juan he became a different kind of doctor he took his location being in Puerto Rico has sort of license to do whatever he wanted however he wanted it so this is what we have accounts of first of all he refused to treat some of his patients just to see what would happen he tried to induce disease in others again to see what would happen by restricting their diets he referred to his patients to his colleagues as experimental animals and then he wrote a letter he sat down and he wrote a letter in which he said to it to a colleague in Boston I said you know Puerto Rico is beautiful the weather is incredible I love the islands however the problem is with the Puerto Ricans they're awful they still they're filthy and the thing to do really is to totally exterminate the population and then he said and I started that I've killed eight of my patients and I've sought to transplant cancer into thirteen more hope you're doing well in Boston you're sincerely and just signed off we know that because he then left the letter out it was discovered it was discovered by the Puerto Rican staff of the hospital where he was working and it became a national scandal understandably Puerto Rican said heard the scorn of mainlanders they'd heard talk of the problem of Puerto Rican overpopulation and how mainlanders disapprove but here they saw what they interpreted to be the homicidal racist homicidal intent from a doctor who'd actually killed eight people Cornelius Rhodes left he just fled the islands hoping presumably that what happens in San Juan stays in San Juan the government did a investigation it uncovered another letter which the governor deemed worse than the first but the governor who was appointed governor who's a mainlander who's been appointed and not elected suppress that letter we don't have it we've we know researcher has ever seen it or found it and concluded after having suppressed evidence that Cornelius Rhodes probably didn't kill eight of his patients he was probably just joking or something like that and Cornelius Rhodes never faced a hearing not only that he didn't even get fired so he returned to New York he continued his job he was quickly he quickly became the vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine and then during World War two he became a colonel in the Army and became a chief medical officer in the chemical warfare service so that's not only a promotion just think about what that allows him to do because the chemical warfare service is preparing the United States to enter a gas war if it comes to that so in order to do that it tests out all kinds of poison gas first on animals goats are preferred but ultimately on human subjects on uniforms men who are without a lot of informed consent either having mustard agents apply to their skin to see how their skin blisters are put in gas chambers with gas masks just see how long they can stay in there they're locked in there just until they falter or in a lot of cases there's a island that the United States uses off of Panama San Jose Island and men are put in the field and they're asked to sort of stage mock battles but while they do that they're gassed from overhead and then the you know this is to see how they're affected and interestingly professor innovar there were many Puerto Ricans who served in World War two who ended up stationed in Panama and being subjected to some of the mustard gasps experiments that were conducted at that time I know because one of my uncle's who served in the in the 65th Infantry who was in Panama and was subjected to those to those experiments so it's it's the interesting thing though is that Cornelius Rhodes remained a major figure didn't he in the medical world and way up into or only recently only in recent years has there been an attempt to sort of revise or reform of the image of him in the medical community that's exactly right so after overseeing these medical experiments with gas in which 60,000 uniforms men a lot of them Puerto Rican were subjected without informed consent to chemical weapons and many of them suffered debilitating effects as a result of this emphysema eye damage genital scarring psychological damage some of these men were really harmed by this nevertheless that also didn't impede him and in fact some of that work with chemical agents alerted him as well as some other doctors to the possibility that mustard agents could be used to treat cancer Cornelius Rhodes took some of the surplus stock of u.s. chemical weapons after the war and became the first director of the sloan-kettering Institute and then used his position to sort of launch the you know turn to chemotherapy and tried chemical after chemical after chemical out on fighting cancer the incredible thing is that within the US medical community that's what he was remembered for 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 a war was award was given for more than 20 years before 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 it had been 23 years the informational segregation had been so extraordinary that have been 23 years before the mainland medical community realized that the guy that they'd been enthusiastically cell braiding had I at least said in the letter that he killed eight of his patients the medical community has you know now gotten the memo and there's been the the award has been changed and and now there's an understanding of his dual legacy but what's extraordinary to me is just how long he got away with it just how long he was able and how many Puerto Ricans he was able to experiment on in some of the worst ways imaginable without facing the consequences of that so as we talked about Puerto Rico let's talk about this issue of the language used moving the 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 place like Puerto Rico when you talk about the Constitution or Guantanamo and Cuba being outside the Constitution in your book you're talking about this is clearly something one has known all of its life but you don't even have trial by jury in Puerto Rico there's the constitutional right to trial by jury doesn't apply to Puerto Rico so I'm from Pennsylvania but if I were to travel to San Juan I would lose that right upon arriving in Puerto Rico and that issue of the changing language from colonies to talking about them as territories the leadership of the United States understanding what the language meant and the president Trump referring to for example Puerto Rico and some astounding quotes about Puerto Rico as you them yeah let's talk about that so when the United States initially acquires the bulk of its overseas territories those territories are referred to by the leaders of the United States people like Teddy Roosevelt Woodrow Wilson in a really forthright way they're called colonies because of course that's what they are and these men are forthright defenders of empire and are very proud and happy to call the overseas possessions of the United States colonies but that doesn't last very long by about the 1910s or so you see government officials becoming very nervous about the c-word and seeking to replace it with euphemisms so territory is a gentler term legally there's not an important distinction in US law but it's it's a term that at least you know seems consonant with the fabric of the United States Kansas have been a territory Montana and been a territory and they're States so the practice in the United States has been since the early 20th century to refer to the overseas parts of the United States as territories rather than as colonies but nevertheless there's still a clear sense from the leaders of the United States that such places don't really fit in the country and Trump isn't the first person to enunciate des but like with so many other things from kind of says the quiet parts out loud so after the hurricane damage both hurricanes Irma and Maria damaged Puerto Rico you know Trump had to sort of speak about this he does this remarkable thing where when he addresses Puerto Rico he refers to it in the second person so I hate to tell you Berto Rico but you've thrown our budget out of whack now of course Puerto Rico is part of the United States Puerto Ricans have been citizens for over a century nevertheless in Trump's mind it's very clear that there's a homeland which is the kind of place you can build a wall around the contiguous United States and then there are these other parts of the United States which seemed to him to be foreign another really good example of this is after a federal judge in Hawaii blocked Trump's Muslim from travel ban Jeff Sessions expressed amazement that a judge sitting on a Pacific Islands could block the president of course that has to do with the notion that Hawaii isn't really part of the United States well and talking about Pacific Islands talk about these the specs of land in these islands and these territories where sometimes they're not even people but yet they are critical or important to the United States is have strategic value our considered territories of the United States yeah I think that's important to remember that the United States has inhabited territories it has five of them but it also has a lot of just other lands including uninhabited and that's in fact the first u.s. entry into overseas empire the familiar borders of the United States the ones you picture in your mind when you think of the country those were sort of finally filled out in 1854 with the Gadsden Purchase but three years later the United States started claiming overseas territory in the form of uninhabited islands in this case they were called guano Islands because they were sort of islands that birds landed on and deposited for centuries feces that just sort of piled higher and higher dried in the Sun and was an incredibly useful source of fertilizer so in pursuit of this fertilizer the United States claimed nearly a hundred guano Islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific you know they were useful for fertilizer and not much else in the nineteenth century but in the 20th century it turned out that the same features of those islands that made them attractive to birds small islands in the middle of an oceanic desert good places to land made them also really useful for planes so the United States has repurposed some of those islands as military bases as places to store nuclear weapons as places to land plans in fact it was on her way to one of those guano islands Howland Island that Amelia Earhart's plane went down and that makes sense right Howland Island is seemingly nowhere you know next to nothing a remote island in the Pacific but if you're trying to fly a plane across the Pacific having Howland Island is really important well we hear a lot about these China trying to build extend a landing a an airstrip in small islands off the coast of China but the United States has been doing this around the world for for decades and decades asn't it yes so I think if you were to characterize the United States as territorial Empire today I think you could call it a sort of pointillist empire in that it consists mainly of islands and bases just small specks where the United States can move can stages things can put transceivers can store things and China's taking a page from that book China doesn't have the same territorial extent the United States has it doesn't have the same kind of history in the 20th century of you know getting to claim all these islands so China's doing something really interesting was it which is it's making its own islands it's actually creating artificial islands that serve the same purpose that can be used as little points as military bases as a way for China to extend its influence by having these little specks of land and finally we just have 30 seconds but from the Beatles to the peace symbol explain its connection to colonies and anti so it turns out that these specks of lands not just don't just matter for the US military they matter a lot for the people who've lived around them and what I found in my book was that both the peace symbol and the Beatles are in some ways artifacts of the US basing system the peace symbol as a reaction to the fear of US military bases and the Beatles as a band they grew up in the shadow of the largest u.s. air force base in Europe we want to thank you so 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 greater United States and that does it for our show Democracy Now is produced by Mike Burke Dina Guster nermeen Shaikh Carla Will's Tammy Warren of Sam al Kahf John Hamilton Robbie Karen honey Massoud Trina Dorota Maria studio and Livie draining Mike Dippolito Miguel Almaguer engineer special thanks to Becca Staley Julie Crosby I'm Amy Goodman with Juan Gonzalez thanks so much for joining us you

Channel: Democracy Now!

Views: 1,198,561

Keywords: Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, DN, News, Politics, democracynow.org, Video, Independent Media, Daily News, Breaking News, World News, Interview, imperialism, U.S. history, territories, colonies, Puerto Rico, Philippines, military bases, colonization, Daniel Immerwahr, Northwestern University, How to Hide an Empire, Guam, citizenship, civil rights, independence, autonomy, power, foreign policy

Id: RvlUGYvLg0s

Length: 30min 32sec (1832 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Communism2024]

I was just about to post this. It's a pretty solid introduction to why leftists are against things like the state of Israel, sanctions on North Korea, and the current coup attempt that's occurring in Venezuela.

[u/karmen-x]

as someone who isn't american i thought this was pretty interesting.