How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
nymag.com
nymag.com
...
> For Immerwahr, this transformation poses the puzzling question of why, at the height of its power, the U.S. decided to divest itself of all but a scattering of its territorial holdings. He argues [insert bunch of convoluted explanations]
The answer is clear and was unwittingly already admitted: nobody cared. With the exception of Manifest Destiny, the U.S. had always been inward looking. We ended up with far flung colonies because we kept stumbling into the role of major power. Prior to WWII, the only time we wrestled with the inevitability of our place was with the Monroe Doctrine, which is less an exception and more an affirmation that the United States had little interest in imperial power for its own sake. Many political and industrial leaders wished otherwise and attempted to force the U.S. into the position, but it could never be sustained because of the domestic disinterest.
It's no coincidence that the balance of political power shifted from the states to the Federal government at the same time the U.S. actively pursued a dominating international position--abortively prior to WWII but completely subsequent to WWII. And it's becoming increasingly clear that the end of the Cold War may have heralded a retreat to our old ways. Again, no coincidence that our national identity is as fractured as it ever has been in the modern era.
A national identity that was defined in contradistinction to foreign identities, and an economy so dominated by foreign trade that economic interests in overseas, non-European markets could wag the dog--these are things the U.S. never experienced (at least not prior to WWII), but characteristics shared by every actual colonial and imperial power.
As for the pervasive racist beliefs, they had nothing to do with colonialism. Conflating these things simply obscures the underlying dynamics. It's actually counterproductive because it permits people to deny the real racism by denying its imperialist past--which is easily denied because of facts. Similarly, it minimizes the continuously antagonistic, if not continuously genocidal, attitude toward Native Americans. By trying to shoehorn American history into the narrative of European and Japanese imperialism one is implicitly equivocating our treatment of Filipinos and Cubans the same way we treated the Native American nations. That's facially and tragically false. It's a lazy, pernicious attempt to import moral arguments from the anti-colonial movement into the American debate. It neither sheds light on historical tragedies (domestically or internationally) nor helps us grapple with our contemporary prejudices.
I disagree with that description. The explanation seems quite clear, and consistent with my understanding of the history.
"With the exception of Manifest Destiny, the U.S. had always been inward looking ... We ended up with far flung colonies because we kept stumbling into the role of major power. Prior to WWII, the only time we wrestled with the inevitability of our place was with the Monroe Doctrine"
Manifest Destiny is a huge exception - enough to make 'always been inward looking' be meaningless. It helped justify America's own imperialism. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Paris_(1898) , "The U.S. appealed to the principles of Manifest Destiny and expansionism to justify its participation in the war, proclaiming that it was America's fate and its duty to take charge in these overseas nations."
That Wikipedia article cites https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourc... : "Victory in the Spanish-American War transformed the United States, a former colony, to an imperial power. Many Americans saw this development as a natural part of the nation’s “Manifest Destiny”--the belief that expansion of the United States was both right and inevitable."
We did not "stumble" into paying Spain $20 million for The Philippines. We need only look at the name 'American Anti-Imperialist League' to know that it was a considered decision.
Finally, "As for the pervasive racist beliefs, they had nothing to do with colonialism".
I find it hard to accept that statement without substantial evidence to show that works like:
"Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War" - https://apjjf.org/-Paul_A_-Kramer/1745/article.pdf
"“Racism” and Colonialism: Meanings of Difference and Ruling Practices in America’s Pacific Empire" - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Julian_Go/publication/2... . Quoting from it:
> It would seem indisputable that modern colonialism in the early twentieth century involved racism. ... The historian Partha Chatterjee refers to this as “the rule of colonial difference”—the colonized, by virtue of their biology, were represented “as incorrigibly inferior” (1993, pp. 19, 33). Traditional scholarship has thus treated racism as “a built-in and natural product [of colonialism], essential to the social construction of an otherwise illegitimate and privileged access to property and power” (Stoler 1992, p. 322). More recent scholarship in the humanities has added that the very purpose of colonial discourse was “to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin; in order to justify conquest” (Bhabha 1994, p. 70). Almost by definition, then, modern colonialism entailed “racism”: ..
That last quote shows that your viewpoint that 'pervasive racist beliefs ... had nothing to do with colonialism' is far from being the majority held position among scholars.
Or as the article says, President William McKinley said that God told him to "educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them". How is that not racist?
As another counter-example, why did the US acquire Hawaii? It was not part of the continentalism "Manifest Destiny", nor was it part of the Americas under the Monroe Doctrine.
Because there were tons of Yankee traders there and the local population was so decimated by disease that population replacement was possible, as in the continental US. This stands in marked contrast with the Philippines and Cuba. The Filipinos and Cubans were not going to drop like flies so they couldn’t be made a minority in their own land.
Using those labels in the context of American occupation of and atrocities in the Philippines and elsewhere doesn't add any clarity or explanatory power to American motivations or the experience of the victims. Some things are just things unto themselves, or require drawing much less convenient parallels--say, to modern China or ancient Persia.
That's why I saw it's lazy and pernicious. Lazy because I think it's a framework that permits privileged American academics to criticize opponents (e.g. in the debate over the Iraq war, or in the debate over the legacy of slavery) without having to come to terms with their own culpability and inheritance; because colonialism and imperialism are so truly foreign to the American experience that one can easily see other Americans (now or historically) as imperialist but not one oneself. Fabricated narratives are more malleable that way. Pernicious because it only adds obfuscation and confusion, which is anathema to the truth and to the task of preventing future harms.
"imply much more cohesive ... strategies"
Like the long use of US military to support US business interests through gunboat diplomacy, going all the way back to Fillmore's mission that Perry, with his Paixhans shell guns, open up Japanese ports for US trade? BTW, how do you explain that in your viewpoint of America's lazy imperial exceptionalism?
Similarly, explain the large number of US military interventions in the Americas under the 'Roosevelt Corollary' upending of the Monroe doctrine.
The members of the American Anti-Imperialist League would also have disagreed with you.
As do the many historians to who refer to American imperialism so often. Eg, see a Google Scholar search for "American imperialism" at https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22american+imperialism... . (To be fair, a small minority disagree with that characterization.)
Since so many people with much more experience on the topic disagree with you, I think you understand why the onus is on you to be more persuasive, especially as your given explanation seems to be it "just happened".
Contrary to your assertion, it does give clarity or explanatory power to American motivations in the Philippines. One factor leading to those atrocities was the use of military troops which existed, and expanded, primarily to fight the wars against the native peoples of North America. That is, American continental expansion drove the desire to expand internationally, and provided the cultural and organizational framework by which to control (and destroy) other populations.
It also can and does get people to understand their "culpability and inheritance". How do you view the California Genocide if "colonialism and imperialism are so truly foreign to the American experience"? While I see the history of US westward expansion as a story of colonialism, in need of public "Truth and Reconciliation" commissions to help align general US cultural views of our history with the actual history. In hopes, I'll add, of preventing future harms.
A point of this New York magazine article, after all, was to highlight that the current narrative is fabricated, and thus (to use your words) more malleable and pernicious. I quote from the article:
> Only an American such as myself could be so totally oblivious to their own country’s imperial past. “One of the truly distinctive features of the United States’ empire is how persistently ignored it has been,” the historian Daniel Immerwahr writes in his introduction to How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, his new book on the United States’ overseas empire. Triumphalist accounts of the U.S.’s rise to superpower status usually begin with World War II: Pearl Harbor roused the sleeping giant to save the world from fascism. But if the United States had been sleeping, it was only a brief nap after a vigorous workout. From the early 19th century through the 20th, the U.S. assembled a sprawling overseas empire, which grew to include the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, Alaska, the Panama Canal Zone, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa, comprising millions of colonial subjects. This story resists a happy moral arc.
Chapter 22, which we never reached when I was in HS, is titled "From Isolation to Empire". The last section is titled "Non-colonial Imperial Expansion", and it's relevant to this topic:
> If one defines imperialism narrowly as a policy of occupying and governing foreign lands, American imperialism lasted for an extremely short time. With trivial exceptions, all the American colonies - Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Guantanamo base, and the Canal Zone - were obtained between 1898 and 1903. In retrospect it seems clear that the urge to own colonies with only fleeting; the legitimate questions raised by the anti-imperialists and the headaches connected with the practical management of overseas possessions eventually produced a change of policy.
> ... the Roosevelt Corrollary and dollar diplomacy signalled the consolidation of a new policy. ...
> Yet imperialism can be given a broader definition. The historian William Appleman Williams, a sharp critic, has described 20th-century American foreign policy as one of "non-colonial imperial expansion." Its object was to obtain profitable American economic penetration of underdeveloped areas without the trouble of owning and controlling them. Its subsidiary aim was to encourage these countries to "modernize," that is, to remake themselves in the image of the United States. ...
> Examined from this perspective, the Open Door policy, the Roosevelt Corollary, and dollar diplomacy make a single pattern of exploitation, "tragic" rather than evil, according to Williams, because its creators were not evil but only of limited vision. They did not recognize the contradictions in their ideas and values.
So there too you see that the US had an empire, in practical terms, and depending on the definition, that imperial policy existed for more than a few years.
1. the Civil War, establishing a new level of federal supremacy
2. the 16th amendment, establishing a federal income tax
3. the 17th amendment, which stopped states from choosing senators who would rein in federal power
Other factors may be:
4. abuse of the commerce clause, with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish and the end of the Lochner era.
5. ease of movement and communication (rail, cars, radio, TV) reducing feelings of identification with individual states
6. the speed and complexity of modern war making it necessary to continuously maintain an active-duty military with an active weapons supply industry
Colonialism and imperialism are labels that imply particular motivations and dynamics. Just because America did some [horrible] things that resembled the things other powers did doesn't mean the same narrative can or should apply.
American exceptionalism is real. We're just not always exceptional in the ways we think we are. And we're not exceptional in being exceptional. China is exceptional. Western Europe (and now Europe) is exceptional. Imperialism and colonialism is reflection of Western European (and Japanese, in so far as they deliberately imported it) exceptionalism. It makes no more sense to use colonialism and imperialism to describe American history as it does using Manifest Destiny to describe European history. Likewise with slavery--you're not going to get very far in terms of addressing the legacy of slavery by lumping the American slave trade in with the European slave trade, despite the obvious and substantial and, indeed, causal relationships. There are infinite parallels to draw, but doing so doesn't contribute much to understanding what happened and why it happened.
The law of tort distinguishes cause in fact and proximate cause. A proximate cause must be a cause in fact, but a cause in fact isn't a proximate cause. Scholars can identify all sorts of causes of fact about American occupation. And they can show how those causes of fact are identical to the causes of fact in colonialism and imperialism. But so what? Broader historical narratives aren't based on a set of causes of fact, but on higher-order dynamics--the proximate causes of why things happened the way they did.
First Nations people get tax breaks, land allotments, access to certain grants and services that their white countrymen do not. Taking this away would be seen as a slight and short-term would be really damaging to these communities.
It's a vicious cycle kind of .. if we have special rules for native communities it is almost like we still have a form of segregation. But finding a path away from these rules that doesn't piss off everyone involved is basically impossible.
First, if you mention that America has an overseas empire, you probably need to let us know exactly what the empire contains. Maps of European imperialism exist and help us understand what an "overseas empire" actually looks like. In the article, aside from the Philippines, there is no mention of any other largely populated countries. We have no idea of the scale of the "American Overseas Empire" at all.
Second, if you're trying to say that the American Empire is larger than it's colonization, it's be nice to let us know, again with a map, the sphere of influence under American rule. Telling us that America has many military bases is a poor substitute.
Finally, the author is picking through straw with his examples of Jefferson and FDR.
America is an empire. It's influence has been global since the turn of last century. The extent of American influence is seen everywhere. There are many books and articles on America's influence on the world that fairly cover both sides of history.
The reason why colonization is not often talked about is because it's an outdated and inefficient practice that America just didn't care much about. It's why the Europeans deprecated it - ruling a country in order to benefit from it's resources is inefficient because you actually have to govern it and govern it pretty well for you to have any long term benefits. There's much easier and more direct ways for you to gain benefits from others, and believe it or not, most of them are mutually beneficial to both parties.
If a top telco or a power plant relies on Google, then they are effectively colonized by Google. If some human traffickers rely on PayPal and Salesforce, they delegate control and data to those companies. This is also the main appeal of crypto, block chain, and open source; decentralization gives back control.
The US plays this game well, but again, it looks inside. Countries like China and Germany are doing best at extending their influence outside the country.
If it is a book review, there should be more separation between the book's content and the critic's viewpoint. The 'objective critic' is what we want to know if we read a review of someone else's work. Whereas this line joins the two viewpoints together together:
> Only an American such as myself could be so totally oblivious to their own country’s imperial past.
More commonly they'd just put a tariff in place, which is likely cheaper to pay for than a war and occupation.
I would note that the US struggled to produce rubber in the Phillipines, so they didn't exactly get that out of the occupation: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/philippines/1926-07-...
"At first, “Pearl Harbor” was not the way most people referred to the bombings. “Japs bomb Manila, Hawaii” was the headline in one New Mexico paper; “Japanese Planes Bomb Honolulu, Island of Guam” in another in South Carolina. Sumner Welles, FDR’s undersecretary of state, described the event as “an attack upon Hawaii and upon the Philippines”. Eleanor Roosevelt used a similar formulation in her radio address on the night of 7 December, when she spoke of Japan “bombing our citizens in Hawaii and the Philippines”.
That was how the first draft of FDR’s speech went, too: it presented the event as a “bombing in Hawaii and the Philippines”. Yet Roosevelt toyed with that draft all day, adding things in pencil, crossing other bits out. At some point he deleted the prominent references to the Philippines."
This is how I expect media to describe the US External Politics
If President is Democrat:
* If President Raises Military Expenditure: "he is helping protect the people of the world from tyrant governments"
* If President Lowers Military Expenditure: "we cant afford this many wars, we must instead focus on our own problems, we must focus on (insert recent catastrophe, that's inevitable in the US like a wild fire in the West Coast or a tornado in the East Coast)"
If President is Republican:
* If President Raises Military Expenditure: "he is being imperialist, we don't want this blood in our hands"
* If President Lowers Military Expenditure: "he is letting the tyrants like him do their bidding, remember the little kids in Africa, if we don't step in, who will?"
Beautiful!
Full context of "empire": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Liberty