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

The US is the only country whose flag “must change when the shape of the country does” (227). In the wake of World War II, there were many discussions regarding the status of American territories. Ernest Gruening pushed for Hawaii’s and Alaska’s statehood and designed a 50-star flag. There were even discussions of “annexing Japan’s outlying and mandated islands as ‘State of American Pacific’” (228). As Alaska and Hawaii gained statehood, the percentage of people living in the Greater United States dropped from 51% to 2%.

Globally, decolonization sped up after World War II. Japan’s performance in the initial stages of World War II meant that the “[c]olonized peoples had seen their white overlords defeated by an Asian power” (230). Armed national liberation movements included China’s Red Army of Mao Zedong, the Viet Minh, and the Indian National Army. For the US, these liberation movements challenged Washington’s economic interests in Asia. At the same time, President Truman began downsizing the US armed forces. When Turman decided to slow down the dismantling, 20,000 American troops in Manila protested. Many other protests were held around the world from Germany to China and in the US itself. The government tacitly gave in to such demands, downsizing the armed forces from eight million in 1945 to just under a million in mid-1947.

The question of the Philippines was central at this time. While decolonization seemed to be a good idea, there was the fact that some Filipino elites were seen as collaborating with the enemy during Japan’s occupation. Manuel Roxas, MacArthur’s former aide, was cleared of collaboration charges and was elected President of the newly-independent Philippines (1946-1948). When the Philippine flag rose for the first time, MacArthur stated, “America has buried imperialism here today” (237). The author argues that the US was setting its largest colony free “so as not to look bad in the eyes of Asians” (237).

Changes took place in other territories. In 1950, Guam received citizenship and a civil government. Making Hawaii and Alaska states was noteworthy because Alaska’s population was roughly 50% white and 50% Indigenous, whereas in Hawaii, white people were outnumbered. As with the Philippines, mainland American politicians had to “reconcile themselves to the prospect of states not firmly under white control” (238). For the first time in American history, “the logic of white supremacy had not dictated which parts of the Greater United States were eligible for statehood” (240). Hawaii’s first nonwhite Congressmen, Chinese American Hiram Fong and Japanese American Daniel Inouye of the 442nd Infantry Regiment fame, championed civil rights.

Years after Cornelius Rhoads left Puerto Rico, many Puerto Ricans feared medical care and the mainland in general. The territory had many socioeconomic problems. One of the local politicians tasked with solving the island’s problems was Luis Muñoz Marín, the first elected governor of Puerto Rico (1948-1964) and the key force behind the Puerto Rico commonwealth. Muñoz Marín was “a sharp critic of colonial rule” (244) who was interested in potential links between poverty and colonialism. By 1946, he had rejected independence and championed a “middle solution” (245).

The question of tackling Puerto Rico’s population was delicate. Birth control “stoked the ire of the nationalists” (247) thanks to the Rhoads affair. As a result, contraceptives were offered in family planning clinics without aggressive promotion, while the government publicly displayed neutrality. The island became a test laboratory for the birth control pill led by Gregory Pincus. Pincus was endorsed by Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and offered “virtually limitless funding” (248). He began to undertake “certain experiments which would be very difficult in this country” (248). In the 1950s, Pincus attempted testing the pill on Puerto Rican students, then female prisoners, and finally settled on a housing project. The birth control pill at that time “had a far higher dosage than the pill does today” (248), and many women experienced side effects like nausea and stomach pains. In some cases, the principle of informed consent was violated. As the birth control pill was legalized by the FDA in 1960, Puerto Rico became “central to the history of contraceptives” (249), including diaphragms and intrauterine devices (249).

However, contraceptives did not do well in Puerto Rico for several reasons—from the social stigma to female sterilization, a program led by doctors themselves. There were virtually no “documented cases of outright compulsion” (250), but sometimes the procedure was performed shortly after giving birth under less-than-ideal circumstances. In 1965, “more than a third of Puerto Rican mothers between the ages of twenty and forty-nine had been sterilized” (250). At the same time, it was women that fled the island in search of better opportunities on the mainland, especially in New York City, and often worked in the domestic service industry.

Albizu returned to Puerto Rico in 1947. He considered the first elected governor a puppet. Luis Muñoz Marín’s Gag Law made it illegal to oppose the government, with heavy penalties. In October 1950, Albizu’s nationalists “declared independence and staged attacks on seven towns and cities at once” (253). The National Guard and police intervened. Meanwhile, two nationalists living in New York, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, attempted to assassinate President Harry Truman, on November 1, 1950. By chance, the President escaped the ordeal, while Torresola was killed by police. Collazo received the death sentence, which was later commuted to life in prison.

In Puerto Rico, Albizu was also arrested. The new government received the name “commonwealth” (256). In Muñoz Marín’s view, the new relationship with the US “was consensual” (256) because the electorate had spoken. In contrast, Muñoz Marín’s legal advisor believed that “Puerto Rico was still a colony, subject to the ‘almost unrestricted whim of Congress’” (257). On March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists, including Lolita Lebrón, shot five congressmen, all of whom survived. Albizu, whom Muñoz Marín believed to be behind this act, was arrested again and landed “in custody till the last months of his life” (259). The mainland continued to perceive such acts as “a freak event” (259) rather than examining its political and socioeconomic roots.

As the formal American Empire “visibly diminished” (262) after World War II, Americans began to explore new frontiers. NASA’s first lunar landing came to symbolize such a frontier. It also symbolized immense global technological development between the late 19th-early 20th centuries that led to nuclear weapons and human spaceflight. However, the United States “didn’t even try” to annex the moon, but rather “went to extraordinary lengths to assure the world that the Apollo program was not about expansion or empire” (262). The 1967 Outer Space Treaty ensured that “no nation could claim sovereignty in space” (262).

There are two key reasons why the US was seemingly uninterested in territorial expansion. One was the tidal wave of decolonization after World War II. The second reason was the “empire-killing technologies” (264) that developed artificial, laboratory ways of producing what was previously obtained from the resource-rich colonies. These technologies “also helped to create the world we know today, where powerful countries project their influence through globalization rather than colonization” (264).

One key resource in this transition from naturally-occurring resources to synthetic manufacturing was rubber, “a colonial product par excellence” (264). Rubber was used in everything from tires to insulation and electrical wires. By World War II, the US consumed more than two-thirds of the global rubber supply sourced from the European colonies in Asia. Other countries, like Japan and Germany, also worried about their access to rubber.

As a result, Adolf Hitler attempted to use Germany’s chemical industry to produce synthetic rubber starting from his 1936 Four Year Plan. He used the labor of enslaved people to build the IG Farben plant outside of Auschwitz, dedicated to manufacturing synthetic rubber by captive Jewish chemists like Primo Levi. By the end of the war, Germany failed. In contrast, the US succeeded in its rubber synthesis and had 51 synthetic rubber factories by the end of World War II. These developments meant that natural rubber from Southeast Asia was “no longer a vital necessity, the sort worth conquering territory to secure” (270).

The manufacturing of plastic for all aspects of daily life and the military was another significant industrial development because making things from plastic was “lighter, faster, and cheaper” (271). Between 1930 and 2000, the volume of plastic manufactured annually “had grown to nearly three thousand times” (273). Some called this period the “synthetic age” (274). Behind the scenes, synthetics “remade geopolitics” (274). For many of the resources previously acquired naturally, exhaustion was no longer a serious possibility. This development meant that “national security no longer hung on raw materials” (276).