How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

In the Introduction, Daniel Immerwahr dissects an important event in US history: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That day, Japan attacked Hawaii and other American territories: Wake and Midway Islands, Guam, and the Philippines. In fact, unlike Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded and controlled the Philippines until 1945. The author thus argues that “Pearl Harbor” is, first, a misleading name of the event and, second, the disregard for the other targets highlights the hidden American Empire.

In fact, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speech changed his “Infamy” speech about the bombing to prioritize Oahu, Hawaii, and demote the Philippines by mixing “US and British territories together, giving no hint as to which was which” (5). The author argues that Roosevelt “felt a need to massage the point” about Hawaii because he “was clearly worried that his audience might regard Hawaii as foreign” (6). At that stage, Americans interpreted mainland America as more American than the islands, so Roosevelt emphasized “the American island of Oahu” (6).

Until the early 20th century, leaders like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson explicitly called the US overseas possessions “colonies” (7). However, that language began to change in favor of “territories” around 1914 because the government believed that “[t]he word colony must not be used to express the relationship which exists between our government and its dependent peoples” (6).

The US logo map excludes the American overseas islands and makes Alaska appear smaller than its actual size. The author describes the United States as “a partitioned country, divided into two sections, with different laws applying to each” (10). Interpreting America as “the Greater United States,” which includes Puerto Rico and the Philippines, means that “race has been even more central to US history than is usually supposed” (11).

As a result, How to Hide an Empire “aims to show what the US history would look like if the ‘United States’ meant the Greater United States” (16). The author calls this history a story “told in three acts”: westward expansion; annexation of Alaska and parts of Spain’s former overseas empire, such as Guam and Puerto Rico; and America’s distancing itself from a formal empire through globalization (16).

Since World War II, the United States has engaged in military operations over two hundred times. In the 21st century, the US maintains approximately 800 military bases all around the world. Some are “staging grounds, launchpads, storage sites, beacons, and laboratories” (18). However, since the early 1900s, the US has generally refrained from the term “empire” because it perceives itself as a republic, delegating the imperial status to others such as the Soviet Union, President Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” (20).