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How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
by Daniel ImmerwahrDaniel Immerwahr
Paperback(Reprint)
Boonesborough's achievements were, on the face of it, modest. Yet if the what of Boonesborough was underwhelming, the where carried a larger significance. The settlement was situated on the far side of the Appalachians, which for more than a century had formed a barrier — in law and practice — to British settlement in North America. By blazing his trail through the wilderness, Boone had opened a channel through which hundreds of thousands of whites would soon pour, dragging enslaved blacks along with them. Boone wasn't exactly the "first white man of the West," as one of his biographers insisted. But he was an early drop from a faucet that was about to be turned on full blast.
For European intellectuals, the rough-hewn, frontier-dwelling Boone was catnip. Enlightenment philosophes regarded him as man in his natural state, Romantics as a refugee from civilization. An obscure biographical account of Boone, originally published as an appendix to a history of Kentucky, made the rounds in Europe, where it was republished and speedily translated into French and German.
Boone showed up in European literature, too. The British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft had an affair with one of Boone's acquaintances and, with him, published a fictionalized account of Boone's life. The French Romantic François-Renéde Chateaubriand lifted passages from Boone's biography for his influential epic, Les Natchez, about a Frenchman living among the North American Indians. Lord Byron, the leading poet of the age, devoted seven stanzas to Boone (the "happiest amongst mortals anywhere") in his poem Don Juan.
Yet, oddly, Boone saw almost none of this. Though celebrated abroad, he wasn't much revered at home during his lifetime. He died at the old age of eighty-five in 1820. That was the same decade Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, both, as it happened by near-inconceivable coincidence, on the same day — the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The country went understandably crazy when Jefferson and Adams died. "Had the horses and the chariot of fire descended to take up the patriarchs," a New York paper wrote, "it might have been more wonderful, but not more glorious."
But for Boone's death? Nothing of the sort. He died in the Territory of Missouri, west of St. Louis. He had no money and no land — he was living as a pensioner on his son's small estate. Territorial legislators in Missouri wore black armbands in Boone's honor, but the eastern papers took well over a month to even acknowledge his death, which they generally did with short notices. He was buried in an unmarked grave.
How could that happen? Why didn't someone do something? Did the leading men of the country not know about Boone? They knew. Did they not understand what he represented? They understood.
They just didn't like it.
The disregard in which Daniel Boone was held may come as a surprise. The United States, as the story is often told, was a buoyantly expansive nation from the start. Its founders had wrested liberty from an oppressive empire — turning subjects into citizens and colonies into states — and were eager to push their republican form of government westward across the continent, from sea to shining sea. Men like Daniel Boone, it would seem, were vital instruments of that national mission.
Yet Boone's path was strewn with obstacles. The British had set the ridge of the Appalachians as the boundary to white settlement, making Boone's journey west a crime. The end of British rule did little to improve Boone's standing. The founders viewed frontiersmen like him with open suspicion. They were the nation's "refuse" (wrote Ben Franklin), "no better than carnivorous animals" (J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur), or "white savages" (John Jay). George Washington warned, after the revolution, of the "settling, or rather overspreading the Western Country ... by a parcel of banditti, who will bid defiance to all authority." To prevent this, 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, sisters, 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.
Paper claims to distant land, such as Washington's, were hard to maintain from the East. During the Revolutionary War, Washington had left his considerable estate in the unsteady hands of his distant cousin Lund Washington. Under Lund's less than entirely watchful eye, squatters took up residence on Washington's western holdings (not the Kentucky claims, but others farther north). Irate, Washington set out to put things right, crossing the Appalachians himself on a sort of landlord's vengeance mission.
The expedition did little to temper his disdain for frontiersmen. He recorded that their clashes with Indians had incited "murders, and general dissatisfaction." They "labour very little," he harrumphed, and the merest "touch of a feather" would turn their loyalties away from the United States.
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's impatience with frontiersmen didn't mean that he opposed expansion. In the long term, he depended on it, both to strengthen the country and to profit from his western estates. The issue was the short term. The country was vast, but its government was weak. Squatters who rushed over the mountains were impossible to govern, and the wars they inevitably started were expensive to fight. 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.
By 1791, all Atlantic states except Georgia had followed Virginia and given up their far western claims. As a result, in that year only slightly more than half of the country's land (55 percent) was covered by states.
What was this non-state territory? The Constitution was notably close-lipped, discussing the matter only in a single sentence. It granted Congress the power "to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States." Thus the founding document, which went into extravagant detail about amendments, elections, and the division of power, left wide open the question of how much of the land was to be governed.
Territorial policy was set, instead, by a series of laws, most famously the Jefferson-inspired Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which covered a large part of the present-day Midwest (similar laws covered other regions). The Northwest Ordinance has become part of the national mythology, celebrated in textbooks for its remarkable offer of statehood on "an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever." The territories merely had to cross a series of population thresholds: five thousand free men, and they could have a legislature; sixty thousand free inhabitants (or sooner, if Congress allowed), and they could be states.
But the operative word was could. None of this was automatic, for Congress retained the power to advance or impede territories, both of which it did. Sometimes it denied, ignored, or deflected statehood petitions. That is why Lincoln, West Dakota, Deseret, Cimarron, and Montezuma — all of which sought admission to the union — did not become states.
Moreover, Congress's discretionary authority meant that until territories became states, the federal government held absolute power over them. Initially, territories were to be ruled by an appointed governor and three judges. Even after they gained legislatures, the governor retained the power to veto bills and dissolve the legislature.
"In effect," wrote James Monroe, who drafted the ordinance, it was "a colonial government similar to that which prevail'd in these States previous to the revolution." Jefferson conceded that the first stage resembled a "despotic oligarchy."
That was an apt characterization. The first governor of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair, a conservative Scotsman who'd been Washington's aide-de-camp, had little patience for the rambunctious frontier. He saw himself as a "poor devil banished to another planet." The territory, in his eyes, was a "dependent colony," inhabited not by "citizens of the United States" but by its "subjects" ("white Indians" is how one of the territorial judges described them). Feeling the territorial inhabitants too "ignorant" and "ill qualified" to govern themselves, St. Clair used his wide discretionary powers to impede the formation of states.
The same pattern held in Louisiana Territory, the land Jefferson acquired in 1803 from France. Eastern politicians fretted about the newly annexed land's inhabitants: Anglo settlers, Catholics, free blacks, Indians, and mixed-race folk. "This Constitution never was, and never can be, strained to lap over all the wilderness of the West," warned Representative Josiah Quincy, the future president of Harvard.
Jefferson understood the sentiment. The people of Louisiana were as "incapable of self-government as children," he judged, adding that the "principles of popular Government are utterly beyond their comprehension." Rather than putting Louisiana through the normal Northwest Ordinance procedures, Jefferson added a new initial phase, military government, and sent the U.S. Army to keep the peace. By 1806, the Territory of Louisiana hosted the largest contingent of the army in the country.
Jefferson's appointed governor to Louisiana Territory, like Arthur St. Clair, griped about the "mental darkness" of Louisiana's inhabitants. Allowing them to vote, he believed, "would be a dangerous experiment."
Louisianians protested their disenfranchisement. "Do political axioms on the Atlantic become problems when transferred to the shores of the Mississippi?" they asked on a trip to the capital. Jefferson shrugged his shoulders and did nothing.
Thomas Jefferson wasn't against expansion any more than George Washington was. It's just that, like Washington, he envisioned it as a controlled process.
In his more fanciful moments, Jefferson imagined the United States spreading to "cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws." Yet that vague fantasy was slated, in Jefferson's mind, for "distant times." When it came to the pace of expansion, his ambitions were strikingly modest. In his first inaugural address, he marveled at the "wide and fruitful land" from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and predicted that it would hold "room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation."
Despite his seeming satisfaction with the country's original dimensions, Jefferson came to be known as an expansionist for his acquisition of Louisiana, which extended the country far west of the Mississippi. Yet that was more of an impulse buy than a considered purchase. In sending negotiators to Paris to bargain with Napoleon, he wasn't even trying to get vast tracts of western land. Rather, he wanted valuable ports on the Gulf of Mexico. The initial response of Jefferson's emissary to Napoleon's offer of all of French North America is telling: "I told him no, that our wishes extended only to New Orleans and the Floridas."
Jefferson cared more about the ports than the land because he wasn't searching for room for settlers. Even after annexing Louisiana, he didn't see it as a home for whites. Much of the land still fell under Indian title, and "the best use we can make of the country for some time," Jefferson wrote, was to keep it that way. In his vision, all the land except an area around New Orleans would be "shut up" against whites "for a long time to come." Instead of rushing out to the edges of the new territory, whites would slowly populate the Mississippi Valley, "advancing compactly as we multiply." Jefferson imagined the West would be settled not by nomadic hunters, like Boone (and like some Indians), but by small farmers. So long as they kept to their allotted territory and didn't multiply too rapidly, they could be accommodated.
Excerpted from "How to Hide an Empire"
Copyright © 2019 Daniel Immerwahr.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Introduction: Looking Beyond the Logo Map 3
A Note on Language 21
Part I The Colonial Empire
1 The Fall and Rise of Daniel Boone 25
2 Indian Country 36
3 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Guano but Were Afraid to Ask 46
4 Teddy Roosevelt's Very Good Day 59
5 Empire State of Mind 73
6 Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom 88
7 Outside the Charmed Circle 108
8 White City 122
9 Doctors Without Borders 137
10 Fortress America 154
11 Warfare State 171
12 There Are Times When Men Have to Die 187
Part II The Pointillist Empire
13 Kilroy Was Here 215
14 Decolonizing the United States 227
15 Nobody Knows in America, Puerto Rico's in America 242
16 Synthetics 262
17 This Is What God Hath Wrought 278
18 The Empire of the Red Octagon 298
19 Language Is a Virus 317
20 Power Is Sovereignty, Mister Bond 336
21 Baselandia 355
22 The War of Points 372
Conclusion: Enduring Empire 391
Notes 403
Acknowledgments 485
To call this standout book a corrective would make it sound earnest and dutiful, when in fact it is wry, readable and often astonishing. Immerwahr knows that the material he presents is serious, laden with exploitation and violence, but he also knows how to tell a story, highlighting the often absurd space that opened up between expansionist ambitions and ingenuous self-regard…It's a testament to Immerwahr's considerable storytelling skills that I found myself riveted by his sections on [Herbert] Hoover's quest for standardized screw threads, wondering what might happen next. But beyond its collection of anecdotes and arcana, this humane book offers something bigger and more profound. How to Hide an Empire nimbly combines breadth and sweep with fine-grained attention to detail. The result is a provocative and absorbing history of the United States—"not as it appears in its fantasies, but as it actually is."
The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
★ 12/24/2018
Historian Immerwahr argues in this substantial work that the U.S. is more than the 50 states its name references, and that, despite its identification with anti-imperialism, for more than two centuries the U.S. has been "a partitioned country, divided into two sections, with different laws applying in each"—in short, a kind of empire. The second section is made up of territories, many of which were once called colonies, and which are now barely acknowledged in popular conceptions of the country: first, native lands near the "frontier" of the nascent country; then for a time Hawaii, Alaska, and the Philippines; and to this day places including Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. (And, Immerwahr goes on, the U.S. engages in other kinds of empire-building, through, for example, its massive network of overseas military bases and economic globalization.) Present-day residents of territories "have no representation in Congress... cannot vote for president... rights and citizenship remain a gift from Washington," and their status as U.S. citizens is unknown by almost half of the states' population. This insightful, excellent book, with its new perspective on an element of American history that is almost totally excluded from mainstream education and knowledge, should be required reading for those on the mainland. (Feb.)
"To call this standout book a corrective would make it sound earnest and dutiful, when in fact it is wry, readable and often astonishing. Immerwahr knows that the material he presents is serious, laden with exploitation and violence, but he also knows how to tell a story, highlighting the often absurd space that opened up between expansionist ambitions and ingenuous self-regard . . . It's a testament to Immerwahr's considerable storytelling skills that I found myself riveted by his sections on Hoover's quest for standardized screw threads, wondering what might happen next." —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
"[Immerwahr's] book is written in 22 brisk chapters, full of lively characters, dollops of humor, and surprising facts . . . It entertains and means to do so. But its purpose is quite serious: to shift the way that people think about American history . . . Immerwahr convincingly argues that . . . the United States replaced colonies with chemistry,' and partially 'substituted technology for territory.' It is a powerful and illuminating economic argument . . . the book succeeds in its core goal: to recast American history as a history of the 'Greater United States.' . . . deserves a wide audience, and it should find one." —Patrick Iber, The New Republic
"[How to Hide an Empire] is full of pop-culture references and interesting anecdotes that challenge common sense. Immerwahr's point is not to condemn empire but to explain it. And by doing so, he helps us better understand American foreign and military policy in the present—and the future . . . At its best, Immerwahr's book describes not only a forgotten history but a history of forgetting itself." —Adrian Chen, New York
"Consistently both startling and absorbing . . . Immerwahr vividly retells the early formation of the [United States], the consolidation of its overseas territory, and the postwar perfection of its 'pointillist' global empire, which extends influence through a vast constellation of tiny footprints." —Harper's
"[Immerwahr] writes in the manner of an entertaining and informative lecturer who cannot wait to tell the class his latest discovery from the archives . . . Gore Vidal was fond of referring to Imperial America, and not in an approving way. Were he alive to read this book he would probably endorse it, perhaps only regretting that he had not written it himself." —James Michael, Times Literary Supplement
"How to Hide an Empire takes you on a whirlwind tour of the islands and territories the U.S. has governed from the 19th century on. It draws you in with smartly weaved, gripping stories and constructs an impressively expansive tale of America's global conquests. Manifest destiny takes on a whole new meaning. Simmering beneath all these stories is a powerful throughline: As classic colonialism was being fazed out in the 20th century, a new, more covert form of empire-building set in – with the U.S. at the forefront. It's not a stretch to say that this book will make you think about American history in a new way." —Ramtin Arablouei, NPR
"A richly detailed, thoroughly researched history . . . the author engagingly depicts the nations' conquests . . . Immerwahr animates the narrative with a lively cast of characters . . . A vivid recounting of imperial America's shameful past." —Kirkus (Starred Review)
"There are many histories of American expansionism. How to Hide an Empire renders them all obsolete. It is brilliantly conceived, utterly original, and immensely entertaining — simultaneously vivid, sardonic and deadly serious." —Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Twilight of the American Century
"How to Hide an Empire is a breakthrough, for both Daniel Immerwahr and our collective understanding of America's role in the world. His narrative of the rise of our colonial empire outside North America, and then our surprising pivot from colonization to globalization after World War II, is enthralling in the telling — and troubling for anyone pondering our nation's past and future. The result is a book for citizens and scholars alike." —Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal Age
"This book changes our understanding of the fundamental character of the United States as a presence in world history. By focusing on the processes by which Americans acquired, controlled, and were affected by territory, Daniel Immerwahr shows that the United States was not just another 'empire,' but was a highly distinctive one the dimensions of which have been largely ignored." —David A. Hollinger, author of Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America
"Historian Immerwahr argues in this substantial work that . . . for more than two centuries the U.S. has been . . . a kind of empire . . . made up of territories . . . barely acknowledged in popular conceptions of the country . . . This insightful, excellent book, with its new perspective on an element of American history that is almost totally excluded from mainstream education and knowledge, should be required reading for those on the mainland." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"President Jefferson imagined an 'Empire of Liberty' . . . [but] Immerwahr illustrates how American territorial expansion included control over and governance of millions of Spanish speakers and various Indian tribes who had to be forcefully subdued . . . a useful and informative work, since many of these overseas territories remain under our governance." —Booklist
"In How to Hide an Empire, Immerwahr chronicles the history of . . . 'large colonies and pinprick islands'. The result is a whimsical-serious work: a deft disquisition on America, and America in the world, with a raconteur's touch and keen sense of the absurd." —Stephen Phillips, The Spectator
"Immerwahr peppers his account with colourful characters and enjoyable anecdotes. This tale of territorial empire, he suggests, throws light on the histories of everything from the Beatles to Godzilla, the birth-control pill to the transistor radio." —The Economist
What does bird guano and screw threads have to do with empire? Actually, quite a bit. Immerwahr (history, Northwestern Univ.$SPACE$Thinking Small) explores U.S. history by placing America's overseas colonies and their inhabitants front and center. He shows how westward expansion served as a starting point for America's imperial dreams. In the 1850s, the United States sought out and laid claim to hundreds of islands covered in bird guano, as the excrement reinvigorated soil that was depleted of nutrients. These same islands later served as fueling stations and airfields for America's military. After World War II, with American troops occupying bases around the world, the United States gave up its empire, granting independence to many of its former colonies, such as the Philippines. Immerwahr notes that the resistance of the colonized as well as U.S. technological advantages made an empire no longer necessary. Such advantage allowed America to force other countries to adapt its standards, such as the angle threads wrapped around screws. VERDICT Through archival and secondary source research, Immerwahr recasts American history in a new light in this thought-provoking and insightful work.—Chad E. Statler, Westlake Porter P.L., Westlake, OH
★ 2018-10-02
America extends far beyond the mainland.
In a richly detailed, thoroughly researched history, Immerwahr (History/Northwestern Univ.; Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development, 2015) chronicles the vast American empire from its vigorous westward expansion on the mainland to its reach around the world. Drawing on archival sources and much scholarship, the author engagingly depicts the nation's conquests, first displacing Native Americans, followed by the claiming of uninhabited islands, the spoils of war, and strategic locations. By World War II, territories comprised nearly one-fifth of America's land area. Unacknowledged by most mainland citizens, these possessions have been relegated "to the shadows," with the populaces, at various times, "shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on." America's early forays abroad led to the annexation of small uninhabited islands—nearly 100 of them—that were piled high with bird droppings, coveted as fertilizer. In 1898, Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American War brought a bounty: the Philippines (which the U.S. bought), Puerto Rico, Guam (which came free), and Cuba, which the U.S. occupied under military control. Later, the Virgin Islands, Samoa, and various other sites in the Pacific became American territories, which today comprise around 4 million people "who have no representation in Congress, who cannot vote for president, and whose rights and citizenship remain a gift from Washington." Immerwahr animates the narrative with a lively cast of characters: brusque, egocentric physician Cornelius P. Rhoads, for example, who conducted medical experiments on Puerto Ricans, whom he deemed "the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere." Standing up for colonists' rights—often to their frustration—were Ernest Gruening, governor of the territory of Alaska, and Douglas MacArthur, who led troops in the Philippines during WWII. Although the U.S. has divested itself of colonies, not needed in an era of economic globalization, the nation has invested heavily in military bases, which today number around 800. "The Greater United States," the author notes, "is in everyone's backyard."
A vivid recounting of imperial America's shameful past.
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