The United States likes to consider itself a republic, but it has territories all over the world; The map you see doesn’t tell the whole story.
There are not many ancient episodes more firmly rooted in America’s national reminiscence than the attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s one of the few occasions when many other people in the country can set a date for: Dec. 7, 1941, the “a date that will go down in infamy,” as Franklin D. said. Hundreds of books have been written about her; the Library of Congress has more than 350. And Hollywood has made movies, from the critically acclaimed From Here to Eternity. , starring Burt Lancaster, to the critically panned Pearl Harbor, starring Ben Affleck.
But what those movies don’t show is what happened next. Nine hours after Japan attacked the territory of Hawaii, another series of Japanese planes flew over some other U. S. territory, the Philippines. As at Pearl Harbor, they dropped their bombs, hitting several air bases, with devastating effect.
The attack on Pearl Harbor is just that: an attack. The Japanese bombers attacked, withdrew, and never returned. This is not the case in the Philippines. There, the first air raids were followed by other attacks, then invasion and conquest. Sixteen million Filipinos — U. S. citizens who saluted the Stars and Stripes and regarded FDR as their commander-in-chief — fell into the hands of a foreign power.
Contrary to popular memory, the event known colloquially as “Pearl Harbor” was actually a veritable thunderbolt on American and British possessions in the Pacific. In a single day, the Japanese attacked the US territories of Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island, and Wake Island. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong and invaded Thailand.
At first, “Pearl Harbor” wasn’t the way most people referred to bombings. “Japanese Bomb in Manila, Hawaii,” read the headline of a New Mexico newspaper; “Japanese planes bomb Honolulu, the island of Guam” in South Carolina. Sumner Welles, Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of state, described the occasion as “an attack on Hawaii and the Philippines. “Eleanor Roosevelt used similar words in her radio address on the evening of December 7, when she spoke of Japan “bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines. “
So was the first edition of FDR’s speech: he presented the occasion as a “bombing of Hawaii and the Philippines. “Still, Roosevelt played with this eraser all day, adding elements in pencil, crossing out other elements. At one point, he got rid of vital references to the Philippines.
Why did Roosevelt demote the Philippines? We don’t know, but it’s not hard to guess. Roosevelt seeks to tell a transparent story: Japan had attacked the United States. But he faced a problem: Were Japan’s targets considered “the United States”?Legally, they were unquestionably U. S. territory. But would the public see them that way?What if Roosevelt’s audience didn’t care whether Japan attacked the Philippines or Guam?Polls conducted shortly before the attack show that few people in the continental United States were in favor of a military defense of those countries. remote territories.
Roosevelt no doubt noted that the Philippines and Guam, although technically part of the US, seemed foreign to many. Hawaii, by contrast, was more plausibly “American”. Although it was a territory rather than a state, it was closer to North America and significantly whiter than the others.
However, even when he arrived in Hawaii, Roosevelt felt the need to fix the problem. So, on the morning of his speech, he made another change. He changed it so that Japanese squadrons would bomb not “the island of Oahu,” but “the island of Oahu. “however, “the U. S. island of Oahu. ” There, Roosevelt continued, damage was done to “American naval and military forces” and “many, many American lives” were lost.
An American island, where American lives were lost – that was the point he was trying to make. If the Philippines was being rounded down to foreign, Hawaii was being rounded up to “American”.
One reporter in the Philippines described the scene in Manila as the crowds listened to Roosevelt’s speech on the radio. The president spoke of Hawaii and the many lives lost there. Yet he only mentioned the Philippines, the reporter noted, “very much in passing”. Roosevelt made the war “seem to be something close to Washington and far from Manila”.
It’s not what it seemed from the Philippines, where the air raid sirens continued to sound. “For the Manilans, the war here is now coming towards us,” the journalist wrote. “And we don’t have bomb shelters. “
Hawaii, Philippines, Guam: it’s not easy to know how to think of those places, or even what to call them. At the beginning of the 20th century, when many were acquired (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaii, Wake), their prestige was evident. They were, as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson brazenly called them, colonies.
That spirit of forthright imperialism didn’t last. Within a decade or two, after passions had cooled, the c-word became taboo. “The word colony must not be used to express the relationship which exists between our government and its dependent peoples,” an official admonished in 1914. Better to stick with a gentler term, used for them all: territories.
Yet a striking feature of the overseas territories was how rarely they were even discussed. The maps of the country that most people had in their heads didn’t include places such as the Philippines. Those mental maps imagined the US to be contiguous: a union of states bounded by the Atlantic, the Pacific, Mexico and Canada.
That is how most people envision the US today, possibly with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii. The political scientist Benedict Anderson called it the “logo map”, meaning that if the country had a logo, this shape would be it:
The problem with the logo map, however, is that it isn’t right. Its shape does not match the country’s legal borders. Most obviously, the logo map excludes Hawaii and Alaska, which became states in 1959 and now appear on virtually all published maps of the country. But it is also missing Puerto Rico, which, although not a state, has been part of the country since 1899. When have you ever seen a map of the US that had Puerto Rico on it? Or American Samoa, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas or any of the other smaller islands that the US has annexed over the years?
In 1941, the year of the Japanese attack, another image would have been the following:
What this map shows is the entire territorial extent of the country: the “Great United States,” as some called it in the early 20th century. From this perspective, the position usually called the United States – the logo map – is only one part of the country. A vital and privileged component, no doubt, but still only a component. People in the territories call it the “continent. ”
On this scale map, Alaska is reduced to a small box, as it is in maximum maps. It’s just the right size, which is huge. The Philippines also features prominently, and the Hawaiian island chain (the entire chain, just the top 8 islands depicted on the maximum maps) if superimposed on the mainland, would extend at most from Florida to California.
This map also shows territory at the other end of the size scale. In the century before 1940, the US claimed nearly 100 uninhabited islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Some claims were forgotten in time – Washington could be surprisingly lax about keeping tabs. The 22 islands included here are the ones that appeared in official tallies (the census or other governmental reports) in the 1940s. I have represented them as clusters of dots in the bottom left and right corners, although they are so small that they would be invisible if they were drawn to scale.
Not only is the logo map misleading, it excludes giant colonies and pockmarked islands. It also suggests that the United States is a politically uniform space: a union, voluntarily concluded, of states on an equal footing with each other. But this is not true and has never been true. From its inception until the day of the offer, the United States has been a union of American states, as the call suggests. But it also comprises another part: neither a union, nor states, and (for most of its history) not entirely in the Americas: its territories.
What is more, a lot of people have lived in that other part. According to the census count for the inhabited territories in 1940, the year before Pearl Harbor, nearly 19 million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines. That meant slightly more than one in eight of the people in the US lived outside of the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in 12 was African American. If you lived in the US on the eve of the second world war, in other words, you were more likely to be colonised than black.
My point here is not to weigh forms of oppression against one another. In fact, the histories of African Americans and colonised peoples are tightly connected (and sometimes overlapping, as for the African-Caribbeans in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands). The racism that had pervaded the country since slavery also engulfed the territories. Like African Americans, colonial subjects were denied the vote, deprived of the rights of full citizens, called racial epithets, subjected to dangerous medical experiments and used as sacrificial pawns in war. They, too, had to make their way in a country where some lives mattered and others did not.
What the contemplation of the Great United States shows is that race has been even more central to American history than you might think. It’s not just black and white identities, but also Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoana, and Chamoru (from Guam) identities, among others. Not only did it shape lives, but also the country itself, where borders are crossed, what is considered “American. “Once you look beyond the logo map, you see a whole new set of struggles about what it means to live in the United States. .
Beyond the logo, however, the map can be tricky for Continentals. The national maps used rarely showed the territories. Even the global atlases were confusing. During World War II, Rand McNally’s Ready Reference Atlas of the World, like many other atlases of the time, classified Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines as “foreign. “
An elegance of seventh-grade women at Western Michigan College’s school of education in Kalamazoo scratched her head about it. How, they wondered, could it be that the attack on Pearl Harbor had been an attack on the United States if Hawaii is foreign?They wrote to Rand McNally to ask.
“Although Hawaii belongs to the United States, it is not an integral part of this country,” the publisher replied. “It is foreign to our continental shores, and therefore cannot logically be shown in the United States proper.”
The girls were not satisfied. Hawaii is not an integral part of this country? “We believe this statement is not true,” they wrote. It is “an alibi instead of an explanation”. Further, they continued, “we feel that the Rand McNally atlas is misleading and a good cause for the people of outlying possessions to be embarrassed and disturbed”. The girls forwarded the correspondence to the Department of the Interior and asked for adjudication. Of course, the seventh-graders were right. As an official clarified, Hawaii was, indeed, part of the US.
However, the government can be as misleading as Rand McNally on this point. Take the census as an example: according to the constitution, enumerators were only supposed to count the states, but they also counted the territories. Or at least, they had counted the continental territories. Overseas territories are treated differently. Their population was noted, but they were otherwise excluded from population calculations. Data on how long other people lived, how many children they had, what race they belonged to, was only given for the continent.
The maps and census reports that mainlanders saw presented them with a selectively cropped portrait of their country. The result was profound confusion. “Most people in this country, including educated people, know little or nothing about our overseas possessions,” concluded a governmental report written during the second world war. “As a matter of fact, a lot of people do not know that we have overseas possessions. They are convinced that only ‘foreigners’, such as the British, have an ‘empire’. Americans are sometimes amazed to hear that we, too, have an ‘empire’.”
The proposition that the US is an empire is less controversial today. The case can be made in a number of ways. The dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations was pretty transparently imperialist. Then, in the 1840s, the US fought a war with Mexico and seized a third of it. Fifty years later, it fought a war with Spain and claimed the bulk of Spain’s overseas territories.
But empire is only about seizing the land. What is the subordination of African Americans called?As early as the interwar period, the prominent American intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois argued that blacks in the United States were more colonized subjects than citizens. Many other black thinkers, including Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers, felt the same way.
Or what about the expansion of U. S. economic strength abroad?The U. S. may not have physically conquered Western Europe after World War II, but that didn’t stop the French from complaining about “coca colonization. “Critics felt defeated by U. S. trade. Today, when global businesses are denominated in dollars and McDonald’s has a presence in more than a hundred countries, you can see that they could possibly have been right.
Then there are the army interventions. The years after World War II caused the US military to surrender in country after country. The wonderful wars are well known: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. But there has also been a steady stream of smaller commitments. Since 1945, the US military has been deployed to conflicts or potential conflicts 211 times in 67 countries. Call it peacekeeping, if you like, or call it imperialism. But it is clear that this is not a country that has remained in its hands.
However, among all the talk about the empire, one thing that escapes the eye is the actual territory. Yes, many would agree that the United States is or was an empire, for all the reasons discussed above. But what can most people say about the colonies themselves?No, I’d bet a lot.
It’s not that the data doesn’t exist. Researchers, many of whom paint paintings of the empire’s own sites, have been diligently reading this topic for decades. The challenge is that his paintings have been pushed aside, filed away, so to speak, in the wrong place. Shelves. They are there, but as long as we have the logo map in mind, they will seem unimportant. They will seem like books about foreign countries. The confusion and shrug of the shoulders of the Continentals at the time of Pearl Harbor have not replaced much.
I confess that I myself have made this conceptual error of classification. Although I studied U. S. foreign affairs as a Ph. D. I studied and read countless books about the “American empire” (wars, coups, interference in foreign affairs), no one expected me to know even the most fundamental facts about the territories. They just didn’t feel important.
It wasn’t until I went to Manila, to do some studies on anything else, that I fit in. To access the archives, I traveled through the “jeepney,” a public transportation formula originally founded on U. S. Army jeeps. a segment of the Manila metropolitan area where streets are named after American universities (Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Notre Dame), states and cities (Chicago, Detroit, New York, Brooklyn, Denver), and presidents (Jefferson, Van Buren), Roosevelt, Eisenhower). When I arrived at my destination, the University of the Ateneo de Manila, one of the most prestigious schools in the country, I could only hear the academics speak what to my Pennsylvania ears sounded like virtually unaccented English. To distinguish oneself from the continent, but from the places of colonial rule themselves, is to overlook it.
The Philippines is not a US territory any more; it got its independence after the second world war. Other territories, although they were not granted independence, received new statuses. Puerto Rico became a “commonwealth”, which ostensibly replaced a coercive relationship with a consenting one. Hawaii and Alaska, after some delay, became states, overcoming decades of racist determination to keep them out of the union.
Today, however, the U. S. continues to control territories. In addition to Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, the U. S. Virgin Islands, and a handful of outlying smaller islands, the United States maintains about 800 military bases around the world.
But none of this – not the giant settlements, not the small islands, not the military bases – has made a dent in the spirit of the mainland. In fact, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the American empire is the patience with which it has been able to do so. The British did not question whether a British empire existed. They had a holiday, Empire Day, to celebrate. France has not forgotten that Algeria is French. Only the United States suffers from chronic confusion about its own borders.
The explanation for why is not hard to guess. The country sees itself as a republic, not an empire. It emerged from an anti-imperialist revolt and has since fought empires, from Hitler’s thousand-year-old Reich and the Japanese Empire to the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. Fight empires in your dreams. Star Wars, a saga that began with a Galactic Empire, is one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.
This self-image of the US as a republic is consoling, but it is also costly. Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies and around the military bases. The logo map has relegated them to the shadows, which are a dangerous place to live. At various times, the inhabitants of the US empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.
The card with the logo also comes at a cost for the inhabitants of the mainland. This provides them with a truncated view of their own history, which excludes part of their country. This is a vital component. America’s foreign regions have started wars, given birth to inventions, increased presidents, and helped delineate what it means to be “American. “Only by adding them in the image do we get a complete picture of the country. Not as it seems in his fantasies, but as it is.
How to Hide an Empire: A Brief History of Great America by Daniel Immerwahr will be available at Bodley Head on February 28. Buy it at Guardianbookshop. com
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