how to hide an empire

daniel immerwahr

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Guano but Were Afraid to Ask

Racism is an easy thing to shield yourself from. People are bad about the future. 

So i read the coolest history chapter ever. Guano aka white gold is bird shit. 

The idea of the chapter is why the logo map grew from its tidy borders in 1854. Benjamin Franklin had estimated, and posthumously proven his estimations right, that within a generation the population boom of white settlers in America would outpace the farmlands ability to replenish the right combination of soil to support enough harvests to feed the people.

This was a big deal because the nitrogen in soil was hard to turn back into usable nitrogen without bean bacteria or lightning strikes. We had a lot of dinitrogen on earth, but not enough in its usable reactive compound. 

Good farming rested on the intricate ballets between farmer and earth, choreographed by folk wisdom, a dance to the rhythm of the seasons. This complex system faltered as farmers shifted from growing multiple crops for local consumption to solely raising profitable crops for distant markets. It broke the cycle that would typically return the nitrates to the soil, and lead to “soil exhaustion.”

Farmers thought of damn near everything to substitute and artificiate this process, but came up short, even with human shit, which was too heavy to transport. 

The answer came in the form of islands inhabitable by humans, overrun by birds, and piled a hundred feet high with potent, calcified bird shit, or guano, which can technically refer to any bird or bat feces, the best of which, at least as far as people knew, came from the boobies and pelicans off the coast of Peru. 

America financed a trip to these Chinchas islands to mine the poop but the british-backed Peruvians stopped them.

President Fillmore was willing to start an international war over it, claiming a single Peruvian island was worth more than Cuba and all the Caribbean islands combined. 

People began to think of the other islands sailors had told them about with these calcified poo mountains. Specifically, whalers talked up Howland and Jarvis islands, a thousand miles from the pacific coast. 

Entrepreneurs formed the American Guano Company, capitalizing 10m (a quarter of all capitalized money in 1850) to mine it. It was backed by President Franklin Pierce in the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which pretty much said any US citizen that discovered guano on an unclaimed, uninhabited island would pretty much belong of the US. Any random adventurer could now tramp into the ocean and annex islands into US territory, with, of course, the promise that they would not (and realistically could not) be colonized.

Within a decade, over 100 of them had been added to the empire. The company who mined it had the job of overseas coal miners rife with disease and famine and when they weren’t tricking people into labor with false promises (mainly chinese laborers) they were actively kidnapping them.

Similarly, companies enticed black Georgians into mining coral reef on Devil’s island in the Caribbean for the same reason. When a revolt broke out because the conditions were little different from the slavery dynamic, a case reached the Supreme Court in which these “Black Butchers” who had killed 5 white men were exonerated. The problem with this exoneration, done by then President Benjamin Harrison, was that he had to claim these black citizens had the rights of any Americans, and to do that, he had to claim the island was US territory. 

The Guano islands Act had 3 main legacies.

- Established that boarders of the US needn’t be confined to the continent. It was the foundation for the US entire overseas empire.

- These islands that were nothing more than seabird rookeries and shit mines served as the pointillist empire after WWII (small military bases serving as air fields and fueling stations, giving the US military reach a much different meaning). 

- The haul of nitro poo was about 400k tons. It wasn’t enough to solve the soil exhaustion, but it did give scientists some wiggle room to discover alternatives, alternatives that came in the form of Fritz Haber discovering a technique to synthesize ammonia in 1909.

What would be known as the Haber-Bosch process yielded as much reactive nitrogen as all the guano trade. The difference was that it was scalable. All the sudden a population crisis wasn’t a crisis. Haber had suddenly opened the floodgates for the virtually unlimited growth of human life, making Fritz arguably the single most consequential organism on the planet. 

His invention got him into an institute in Berlin (where he’d go on to promote the career of a gifted young jewish physicist by the name of Einstein) so that when Germany went to war a few years later, he found out how to repurpose the ammonia into explosives that helped Germany win the war. It was ironic that as the gas killed scores of Algerian troops in 1915 that the many who saved the world from starvation would also become the father of weapons of mass destruction. 

Unfortunately, his work continued in the form of Zyklon B, the gas chamber gas that would end up killing many of Fritz’s wife’s relatives. She took her own life before she could see that. Her name was Clara Haber, but her maiden name was Immanwahr. Her cousin max was the authors great grand father. 

4 Teddy Roosevelt’s Very Good Day

People have always liked Teddy Roosevelt because he seemed to embody the very characteristics other politicians pretended at when campaigning for office. He was more than a play acting frontiersman, weathering the elements, writing hunting books. He was still an Ivy League strategist, but so too was he these things. 

So enmeshed was Teddy with the rough-riding western life that the author Owen Wister, who wrote the Virginian (dedicated to Teddy) established the genre of Westerns. 

Consumed with the life of the settler, Teddy found himself unsettled by the fact that settling the frontier had come to an end, the borders were drawn and established. 

The global frontier, too, it seemed, was coming to a close. That was until Teddy, as many other military fanatics around the world, picked up the works of the Naval Theorist Alfred Thayer Turner, who was concerned less with the destination of naval travel than the routes. His argument for maritime commerce directing the wealth of nations focused on how ships couldn’t simply cast off for distant lands. They needed ports, and coal stations, and warehouses, and way stations. 

A country didn’t necessarily need its own bases, they could instead be placed within the borders of their allies during peacetime, which is why Teddy grew, as he had been most of his frontiering life, fervent about starting a war.

The US needed stuff from all over the world (rubber from SE Asia, jute from India, palm oil from west Africa, tungsten from Korea, copper from South America) and as the industrial revolution was shaping up to just be a worldwide scavenger hunt for obscure tropical products, the US needed a war more than ever, according to Teddy. 

It got its taste of that with the guano islands, which inspired them that they could adjust their borders, and instead of creating new empires where there were no new ones left, it could carve them from existing ones. 

This manifested in what we know as the Spanish-American war, which was really a war of Spain’s against its empire-held territories, and the US acted as a carrion bird to land the killing blow and pick up the dead pieces. 

Military intelligence of the Ten Years war between Spain and Cuba showed Spain’s grip was weakening, so much so that Spain was outright executing and exterminating any insurrectionists that popped up. 

President McKinley was president and hesitant to intervene, but as Assistant Secretary to the Navy, Teddy was practically foaming at the mouth to get the war started. He got McKinley to come halfway and post the USS Maine off the coast of Havana, and taking advantage of one of the Navy Secretary’s personal days after the USS Maine spontaneously exploded (likely due to spontaneous combustion in its coal bunkers) and took to the press to the chanting tune of “Remember the Maine!” Paraphrasing the Alamo sentiment.  

“McKinely is bent on peace, I fear.”

Teddy positioned squadrons at the ready and demanded congress to recruit unlimited seamen. Knowing this would be a public demand, and to prevent a perception of weakness, McKinley allowed it and away to war we went, resulting in the battle of Manila bay, which was won in 6 hours. 

After getting permission to storm the Caribbean, Teddy joined the army at a lower post, again using his fervor to seal a loose-canon win with a rag-tag team of the “rough riders” his Ivy League buddies, some frontiersmen, and a handful of token Indians. All he took with him was his two horses, man servant, revolver from the sunken USS Maine, and a copy of Anglo-Saxon Superiority. 

It reads like fiction that the man responsible for starting and expanding the war would take center stage as its hero of such a decisive battle. The man, as president, took a bullet to the chest before a speech, then proceeded to give it, leaking blood, for an hour. 

Why this whole chapter is important is that not just Teddy, but the US, took center stage in a war that we happened to catch the tail end of. We’re described as having overcome insurmountable odds against the Spaniards, but in reality the Spaniard forces were fucked up having been fighting the rebellion of its territories for over a decade. 

It’s also important because as the Spanish surrendered Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to the US, it was these two that did all the talking, while no representative of any of the once-free areas had any say in how its land would be used or what it would become. As the Spanish governor-general explained, “I’m willing to surrender to white people, but never to niggers.”

The two even carried out a mock battle in the phillipines as part of the surrender. The Spanish flag came down, the US flag went up, and all the indigenous people watched, powerless and muted. Spain sold it to them for 20m.

It was what nobody wanted. Nobody but Teddy.

5 Empire State of Mind

Before the Spanish-American war, not even President McKinley could tell you where the Philippines were located.

They came under such scrutiny as potential for their proximity to China and thereby a stepping stone to a trade empire the Navel Officer Mahan of the last chapter had described. The problem was, we didn’t have any businesses over there, and there were less than 10 US citizens over there before the war broke out. 

McKinley didn’t see a good way out of occupying the territory. Give them back? Sell them? Leave them be? All looked like bad business and cowardly to boot. Because he didn’t think Filipinos could educate or govern themselves properly, the only thing to do was uplift, civilize, and Christianize them. 

For a few years after this decision, the Phillipines appeared on the US map, the only time in US history when cartographers rejected the logo map. It was a message map. A signal to the world that the caterpillar hiding in its chrysalis was finally emerging as an imperial butterfly. And the butterfly might need a more fitting name. Examples:

- Imperial America

- The Greater Republic

- The Greater United States

- Greater America

This came alongside claims that The United States of America was no longer appropriate, and it gave rise to a more enduring nomenclatural shift, for how often those in the US were referred to as Americans, its striking how infrequently the word America was used. In fact, from 1776-1898, in all public correspondence uttered by presidents, only 11 clear references to the country as America. It’s not even in the Star-Spangled Banner. The word that does appear, however, is Columbia. 

This all ended whenever Roosevelt took office. He spoke of America in his first annual message and never looked back. In two weeks he’d used the name more than all his predecessors combined had. The year of 1898 was a break from the past, but it was weird because the country already had its borders since the Louisiana Purchase. Why did they need new names now.

What was different was that even though we’d been annexing territory for 100 years, this 1898 acquisitions already had people on them, and they were not white. When we took Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, Texas, Mexico, we added a ton of land but very small foreign populations, and even then, those were native Americans or free blacks. 

Pre-1898 our biggest annexation population bump came from taking Mexico’s territory, when we boosted our square mileage by 70% but our population by only 1.5% during the acquisition from 1845-1853. It was nothing because that 1.5% was far outpaced by white America exploding at 3% a year. 

The Mexican War ended with our occupation of Mexico City. We talked of taking it all, but South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun said “we have never dreamt of incorporating into the union any but the Caucasian race - the free white race.” And so we annexed the thinly populated north and let the populous south go. This gave us all the territory without taking the people.

We tried this in other areas, and the problem wasn’t wanting to expand slavery, but bringing more Latin Americans into the union. Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and thats what you get: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that feed on land but avoid incorporating people. 

This is why we don’t own the Dominican Republic or Nicaragua. It almost happened with Alaska too. The only reason we got that was similar to Mexico: A lot of land and not a lot of Exquimaux. That was kind of silly too because we never really had a good headcount of how many Alaskan Natives there were. But this favored white american imperialism, because you could control who was part of the country and who wasn’t simply by not counting them. 

When the census finally did start counting natives in 1880 and mainland Indians in 1890, they were separated. A nation of Americans and a separate nation of natives. The exclusion was significant, sustaining the fantasy that settlers (like Teddy and his westerns) were taming an uninhabited wilderness. 

But 1898 was different. The Philippines were more densely populated than the US. There were also serious doubts about weather WASPs could live in the tropics. That made it unlikely the colony inhabitants would be displaced like the native Americans had. 

Before the war, law was passed to prevent the US from annexing Cuba, but when the shooting starts, we could only watch as the machine rolled through Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

Hawaii was slightly different, and we seized the island amongst tens of thousands of anti-annexation protesters in 1900. We did the same with Samoa and Wake Island. By the time the dust settled, we’d planted our literal flag on more than 7,000 islands holding 8,500,000 people, holding an area as large as the US with double the people.

Anthony Carnegie tried to buy the Philippines for the 20m just to set them free, but alas, the voices like this won: “God has given us this Pacific empire for civilization,” said Senator Albert Beveridge. “A hundred wildernesses are to be subdued. Unpenetrated regions must be explored. Unviolated valleys must be tilled. Unmastered forests must be felled.”

The name of the game was jettisoning white supremacy. Treat the territories as embryonic states and their inhabitants as full citizens. To get the american people on board, a group of Omaha Businessmen staged the first Greater America Colonial Exposition, where they shipped in small groups from each conquered territory and essentially had them on display to perform for the whites. 

When the natives had all been rounded up, the Port officers refused to let them in. They looked like Chinese, and Chinese weren’t welcome. But people thought they were citizens and thereby had the same rights to enter the states. This forced legislation to clarify that the constitutions references to the US were for the states alone. The territories would shared none of their benefits. The Filipinos in San Francisco Bay weren’t citizens, but subjects. 

It was a great hypocrisy, since whereas legislation from the Black Butchers of Natasha had affirmed the government’s power to apply federal laws in its territories, these new rulings denied territorial inhabitants the right to federal protections.

These 1901 rulings are known as the Insular Cases. The same justices also decided Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the case that upheld the constitutionality of separate but equal Jim Crow institutions. One permitted segregation while the other split the country into two national governments, one with a bill of rights, one not. 

Plessy would be overturned in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, finally overturning a judicial mistake that depraved millions of citizens their rights. The Insular Cases, on the other hand, are still in effect. That’s why a citizen on the mainland has a constitutional right to trial by jury, but when that citizen travels to Puerto Rico, that right vanishes.

Citizenship:

- Puerto Rico - 1917

- US Virgin Islands - 1927

- Guam - 1950

The thing is, in all these cases, because citizenship is statutory, it can be revoked. Filipinos were never made even citizens, though. And American Samoas are still legally only US nationals. They may voluntarily fill our military ranks, but the 14th amendment doesn’t apply to them. 

The Insular Cases are so significant because the ability to distinguish between incorporated and unincorporated america means some places are in the country and some aren’t. 

Today, all the territories that were deemed incorporated have become states. The unincorporated remain territories, comprising 4m people with no representation in congress, who can’t vote for president, and whose rights and citizenship remain a gift from DC. 

6 Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom

So people had flocked to Omaha to check out the imperial zoo, along with a recreation of how we took Manila bay. Troops were in their Sunday best, all but the First Nebraska Volunteers, who were tattered and literally off the boat from the fight overseas. 

The fight went on longer than it should’ve because Commodore Dewey kept promising General Aguinaldo that after the war the Filipinos would have their independence. To prepare for this, Filipinos had drafted a constitution, established a capital, started a newspaper, opened schools, established a university, issued currency, appointed diplomats, levied taxes, and made a flag. It had Stateified itself. 

McKinley, on the other hand, said no way, their would be no joint occupation, Filipinos would have to recognize the authority of US. 

As troops gathered at Manila on both sides, so too did the sex workers. Prostitutes from everywhere: Russia, Romania, Austria, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Japan. A gold rush.

Naturally, Aguinaldo countered McKinley’s counter, and denounced US seizure. He made a republic, and took oath and office as their first president. The US were told to cull this idea. A fight about a dog sparked off the war when private Grayson shot it and its owner, “Line up fellows. The niggers are in here all through these yards.”

A view from afar may have judged both sides to be equally matched, but the closer you got, the better you could see the US was holding real weapons. A third of Manila troops lacked rifles. They had spears and bows and stone-wielding children. They tried to make ammo by melting church bells into bullets, by scraping match heads of fulminate, sapping tree resin for gunpowder. It was all so hodgepodge.

The US was made of organized and well-trained and well-supplied soldiers, too, whereas the Filipino side was made of a motley crew of young soldiers and young leaders. 

The war was long because the Philippines is made of many, many islands. When Malolos fell, the fight went to San Isidro, then to Cabanatuan, to Tarlac, then to the mountains of another island. To find some footing, Aguinaldo changed to guerrilla tactics, using home turf advantageously to fuck US troops up, which was mildly successful. 

General Arther McArthur declared the war over, when really it had just become more subtle. Guerrilla warfare meant US troops occupying a town were oblivious to the marketplace women encoding troop size and movement into the mango and guava prices. The point of guerrilla mobilization wasn’t to win, but to wear down. The point being to bleed the troops and hope the US election would favor the democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan who promised to free the Philippines of US occupation. 

Samuel Clemons aka Mark Twain was the biggest anti-imperialist voice in all this. What’s funny is that Twain started as an imperialist, but as he watched the Philippines get treated how they did, he quickly came to his senses. He suggested the Declaration of Independence should be amended to say: “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed white men.” He was very vocal on how a country posing as half republic and half empire would soon devolve into despotism. Most of his writings, however, remained private even after his death, and only became public in the 60s on just how much he hated empire. 

With so much smearing on the mainland, MacArthur just wanted the war to end. There was so much racism, the word gugu being used by soldiers to refer to Filipinos, the precursor to gook used in Korean and Vietnam wars. Or they were just called niggers, something the recently freed black american soldiers noticed and hated.

The Filipinos even pandered to this, saying that maybe black soldiers should jump ship and switch sides. One, David Fagen, did, and a bounty was put on his head. 

To end the war, MacArthur starved out the barricaded enemy, a method known as reconcentration, which, ironically, was the tactic Spain was using against Cuba that initially provoked the US to help liberate them in the first place. 

It was a sad thing when we did take them, and anti-imperialists bristled that we’d crushed the only republic in Asia. But again, even when we thought the war was truly over, we forget that the Philippines has over 7,000 islands. 

We have this idea of defeat the leader, defeat the enemy, but this was hardly ever the case. Samar, the third largest island in the archipelago was reconcentrated to such an extent that the disease beriberi which is very hard to get is likely why Manila recorded the worlds highest infant mortality rate. 

They starved out the locals while eating like veritable kings. Less than 5,000 US soldiers, mostly claimed by disease, died during the war. 750,000 Filipinos died, more than claimed by the civil war. 

The US tried to make peace with Moroland, a collection of islands in the Mindanao, Palawan, and Basilan archipelago. The Muslim inhabitants, called Moros, were slavers and polygamists. The US didn’t want to fuck with them, and so signed an agreement to let them keep their shit (which meant slavery was legal again in the US). This was the first time the US had ever governed Muslims. 

Captain John Pershing became somewhat of a sympathist as he learned language and culture and even became an honorary father to a moroland princess. 

The man who led most of the Samar destruction was named governor of the Moro Province in 1903 and didnt share Pershing’s sympathy. He killed families and children with impunity. 

“It was the greatest victory ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the US,” said Twain.

Exasperated, Pershing signed an order in 1911 which made everyone hand in their weapons. It wasn’t a violation of the second amendment because it wasn’t logo map soil.

Every one of the savage first twelve chiefs of staff in the White House served in the Philippine war. Our military rule of Moroland was the longest war in history, second only to Afghanistan occupation. 

7 Outside the Charmed Circle

McKinley had hoped the Philippines would go quietly, but they didnt. They Puerto Ricans, on the other hand, cheered them on. They referred to themselves as Porto Rican American and named streets after US presidents. 

They thought rule would be better under the US than Spain, because economically the US would give access to better markets and politically they may give them independence. Politicians formed parties and sought statehood. 

This was the dream to a young Puerto Rican named Pedro Albizu Campos. He loved everything american, and went to run the Cosmo Club at Harvard. It was the schools most interesting club, because it was made of foreign students from China, Germany, Korea, France, Liberia, Japan, South Africa, British Guiana, and beyond. 

It was, admittedly, the wrong time to be at the forefront of this club, as the US had just entered the First World War. The German club members were deported or interned, including Hugo Munsterberg, one of the four fathers of I/O psychology. 

The war was showing off how hasty all the empire fervor had been. Whereas Empire Day became a national british holiday after queen victoria’s death in 1901, America had flag day. One was about examining the world map, the other about the national flag, one which had one star for each state but none for the territories. Nationalism was seizing the country.

We even distanced ourselves from occupation of the guano islands. It helped brushing all this empire talk under the rug because we’d largely stopped annexing places. Congress pass a law limiting what the US could do with Cuba. The loophole was that we could help only when we needed to pacify Cuba, a sentiment eventually defined as whenever it had an unstable government aka a government where money could be borrowed at a reasonable rate of interest. We got Cuba to agree to our demands and write them into their laws, including leasing us one of their ports aka Guantanamo Bay. They’d own it, we’d just have complete jurisdiction and control over it. 

It gave us the benefits of colonization without the responsibility. It also opened a fork in history, one with Cuba on one side, and the other territories on the other. Though it was independent in name, Americans owns its sugar fields, mines, tobacco industry, banks, and most of its land. Cuban kids learned English and played baseball. 

We didnt war with them early on, but their own Afro-Cubans caused substantial infighting. 

What we’d done resonated with Roosevelt, and we worked with the Panama isthmus of Columbia to own a canal we carved to connect the Atlantic and pacific oceans. Roosevelt encouraged the Panamanian nationalists to cecede from Columbia and once they did we struck a canal deal. We weren’t sovereign, but again, it was written into their law that we would retain all rights power and authority over the canal. 

A third time he repeated the tactics in the Dominican Republic. We’d defend their people from rebels and external enemies in control of their finances. 

These slum tactics were called Dollar Diplomacy, or Gunboat Diplomacy. We did it, sending troops to:

- Cuba

- Nicaragua

- Honduras

- The Dominican Republic

- Guatemala

- Panama

- Costa Rica

- Mexico

- Haiti

We put down revolts, replaced governments, offered battleships-in-the-harbor advice, while at the same time we peacefully picked up annexation again by buying the US Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917. 

When Wilson was elected, he was a nice blue change of pace after the McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft onslaught. 

He wasn’t a conquistador. He even hired William Jennings Bryan as is VP.

Filipinos celebrated with the coming of the “Modern Moses.” And I guess he was like the Egyptian raised Israeli: fake.

Wilson spoke of desiring to free the philippines often. He hesitantly signed a bill in 1916 to free them in the next 4 years. Congress made that promise more vague and less promising. They would need that rascally “stable government” first. 

Albizu was still a US acolyte at this point, happy the US was making strides, giving the Puerto Rican citizens the right to elect legislators (which Washington could also low key veto).

Wilson’s sympathy for rolling back empires likely stemmed from his childhood as part of the south when they lost the civil war. He was a part of the “conquered possessions.” He was a defender of slavery. As Princeton’s president, he stood against admitting black students. As POTUS, he looked on fondly allowing segregation legislation. 

While he didnt hate blacks, he did see them as children who he didnt think should be in control of a government or military. He was a sympathizer of the KKK, and his close friend, Thomas Dixon, who wrote the stage play the Clansman, which he then adapted into the infamous movie The Birth of a Nation, an epic history of the south’s redemption by the KKK, in which Wilson approves of the way it quotes him. 

Black activists tried to ban it from theaters, but Wilson strong-armed its approval, and after its White House private viewing, it went public, resurging the once-dead white supremacist movement as it inspired millions.

Wilson later did not object to the Bolsheviks seizing Russia, and as Lenin demanded liberation of the American-held colonies, and Wilson seemed to agree.

The rest of his presidency followed a pattern of peaceful officers reaching out to him, and them being ignored, and this setting the stage to paint us as global enemy #1. Among them were:

- Mohandas Gandhi

- Nguyen Tat Thanh, kitchen assistant from west indo-china who would become Ho Chi Minh

- Zaghlul Sa’d, Egyptian nationalist reformer who would become Sayyid Qutb, the man who inspired Osama Bin Laden. 

- A Chinese Protester who would become Mao Zedong.

- A very US friendly who become Pedro Albizu Campos

8 White City

The US had gutted Spain, and with our growing industries, we now had the world’s largest economy. The two richest pimps were Rockefeller and Carnegie, but it didnt mean everyone else wasn’t still poor. 

It was 1893 and the Columbian Exposition was on display in Chicago to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to America. It’s organizer was Daniel Burnham, one of the first builders of skyscrapers. He built a paper mache skyline for the expo, and while it wasn’t real, he imagine what building a real city might be like, and was enchanted. 

21m of the 70m population attended. They were astonished by the city, but Burnham knew he couldn’t build like that in the states, not with people’s resistance to being displaced in order to realize such a venture.

What was shaping up to be one of the best benefits of imperialism was the roguishness it allowed. They functioned as laboratories with no resistance or oversight. Burnham decided the Philippines would be a good place to try stuff out. 

One of the few Filipino careerists was Emerson’s grandson Cameron Forbes. He loved the tropics, more for the sultan-style lifestyle than anything else. One of his favorite Polo horses was called Nigger.

When Burnham got there to redesign Manila, he discovered a city ravaged by Old Testament events. War, plague, plague, fire. It was a disaster from the human perspective, but an invitation from an urban planner’s. He created a grid from Manila, but his mind was on on Baguio, a place 150 miles from Manila and in a more agreeable climate. He spents years and millions on his work in Chicago, thanking the hundreds of collaborators, but in Manila thanked no one on his six months of which, most of which were spent with his sights on his city from the ground up in the mountains. 

Burnham got to choose an architect who was in a dictatorial position to control the project. Parsons built most of Manila’s landmarks, most of which, at the time, were whites only. 

In Manila, Parsons just made most buildings the same size and shape because it was easier and he had no one to answer to. The same wouldn’t fly in the US. 

Baguio was tough to get through because it was only accessible through switchbacks up a mountain. Lots of people died. Burnham essentially tried to turn this into the capital because it was prettier. Forbes was pumped and got a property for himself. 

It was meant to be a business retreat center although almost no business was done there.

Filipinos hated the Americans for doing this. When the torch passed in Washington, so too did the culture in the Philippines. Juan Arellano would be the first Filipino painter and eventual architect to represent the country’s infrastructure. 

9 Doctors Without Borders

Puerto Rico was a different story than the Philippines. We didnt wage war on them, but the elements did. They were ravaged by disease and hurricanes, one in particular which left thousands killed and more homeless. 

The US Assistant Surgeon Bailey K. Ashford equated it to what it must be like in Dante’s Inferno. Ashford did what others wouldn’t. He enmeshed himself in Puerto Rican life, in language, in love, in all. He started noticing what Americans called Puerto Rican laziness manifested itself in a very specific way: flabby flesh and ghastly pallor. That was just how they were, locals said, just weak and anemic. They just die.

The problem wasn’t their diets, Ashford soon learned. He studied the afflicted’s stool and found worms. Hookworms. They’d burrow into workers’ feet in the coffee fields, work their way into the blood, be coughed up from the lungs, then swallowed to burrow and fester in victims intestines. Several thousand of these in someone makes them pale, listless, and causes them to lose muscle tone. 

They’re a long-winded affliction in human history, originating some 12k y/o as a side effect from domesticating dogs. Puerto Rico was the perfect place for hookworms, with densely populated areas in the highlands. There were no bathrooms on the coffee plantations so people were always stepping in each other’s shit. 

This “anemia” was the leading cause of death in the colony accounting for 20-30% of mortality. It was officially named Necator Americanus (American Murderer). 

Ashford established a clinic to treat hundreds a day, treating them for less than a dollar/patient. His professor Charles Wardell Stiles, who named the disease, found the disease prevalent in the US. People in the south were facing the same afflictions, making Stiles wonder if the disease-causing laziness is why southerners were always called lazy dirt-eaters. These poor whites would actually eat dirt, because their anemia was so strong they’d crave the iron in the soil. 

One of Rockefeller’s first philanthropic endeavors was to campaign for how to solve this endemic. The south, however, did not respond well to being told they needed to work on their hygiene, and at one point Stiles had to be police-escorted from a talk at a school about the hookworms. They threatened to lynch him.

The southern campaign, then needed to be tackled subtly, with grassroots techniques. The foundation employed white doctors to spread the word like preachers, slowly gaining the ear of southern influencers. They doled out medicine without the lectures. The campaign began with a million dollar grant from Rockefeller, whereas its Puerto Rican counterpart got $5k. 

What resulted was a substantial reduction in southern hookworm disease, with enduring economic effect as children stayed in school longer not being sick. It inspired Rockefeller to tackle the issue globally, just not in Puerto Rico. 

Although the campaign brought the death rate down dramatically, it didnt sustain itself, because the fact was most Puerto Ricans were poor, worked outdoors barefoot walking in others shit, and their government was lean on resources diverted elsewhere. When Ashford finally left after decades of work trying to help those in the colony, it was still that 8 in 10 people were afflicted with the disease. 

This is still a disease not happening in a vacuum. Hurricanes thrived, taking 10s of millions in damage on a regular base, and then in america, the Great Depression hit, which fucked PR too. 

Sugar prices and wages tumbled, and then the US put great tariffs on sugar from PR. Mainlanders saw all this as a problem of PR overpopulation, and FDR even said, “the only solution is to the methods which Hitler used effectively.” 

The Rockefeller foundation thought to help with deworming by experimenting on the PRs. They sent Cornelius Rhoads to replace Ashford, and he was no integrator. He regarded the island as a laboratory, a place to try out ideas while facing few consequences. 

He’d run experiments, a treatment group of anemics given treatment while withholding it from the control. He referred to PRs as animals. He was there 5 months before he penned a letter back home which is straight from the mind of a supervillain, wherein he describes his wishes to exterminate them all, and how in fact he had already managed to kill 8 and transplant cancer into several more. He saw that all the US physicians were taking delight in the abuse and torture of the PR subjects. 

If that wasn’t bad enough, this fucking retard left the letter on the nurses station of the hospital he worked at, where it was quickly circulated amongst the PR staff. He tried to pay off the man who would oust him, to no avail. He fled PR. He gave it to Pedro Albizu Campos, who would use it as kindling to enflame a revolution.

Albizu, if you remember, failed to get to the Paris Peace Conference and into the ear of Woodrow, but he still finished his law degree at Harvard. He had been a dreamer, but after spending so much time in the states, he could see how mainlanders thought of PR. Rhoads letter was his proof. He sent copies everywhere, using it as a platform to claim the US wanted the same for PR as they did for native Americans. 

“Where tyranny is law, revolution is order.” He became a radical, orchestrating bombings at post offices and police stations in PR. No one was killed or convicted, but they knew, and Albizu got on the radio to tell everyone to take up their daggers. He was really just PR’s Jesus. 

The chief of police waged a small war with the revolutionaries, leading to some deaths. Hoover sent FBI agents to surveil Albizu’s activities for decades. He was arrest on conspiracy to overthrow the government. A jury didnt convict him, so another was arranged so that he would be. Justice. He lived out most of his life in an Atlanta prison. 

Protests of his arrest on Ponce street where police shot and killed over 100 bystanders remains the bloodiest shooting by police in US history. 

Rhoads letter got chalked up to jest in the US media. He was never tried, nor fired. In 1940, in fact, he was made director of Memorial Hospital in New York. In 1942, elect VP of New York Academy of Medicine. With WWII at hand, he was commissioned as a colonel in the army, where he was responsible for testing the same sorts of poison gas Fritz Haber had developed for the Germans in WWI. 

He had soldiers “voluntarily” participate in testing these posion’s effects. Either liquid poison was applied to their skin, or they were sprayed with it by plane overhead, or they were locked in gas chambers, sometimes for days, and when they wanted out were threatened with a court-martial. 

Rhoads was responsible for testing these poisons on more than 60,000 of its own men. These were secret tests, giving participants cancer, lung disease, psychological damage. 

What you’re likely going to expect next is that the exponents were race-based. Blacks, Japanese, and PR were tested to see if the effects of mustard gas were different on them than whites. These tests were all predominantly performed in the Chemical Warfare Service in San Jose off the island of Panama. PRs were brought because they were easy to get, where participants were Spanish-speaking and therefore were unaware of what they were signing up for. 

This should’ve been enough to get Rhoads into some sort of trouble, right? Wrong. He was responsible for how these tests were carried out, and as a result won a Legion of Merit award for “combating poison gas in chemical warfare.” Unfortunately this trajectory of his was still rising. 

Scientists knew mustard agents attacked lymphoid tissue and bone marrow. After the war, Rhoads took the whole of his Chemical Warfare Service staff to work for him in the hospital for drug development against diseases of the lymph noids. He received $4m from Alfred Sloan (of Sloan Kettering) where he was given permission to try his newly developed chemical drugs on sick patients. 

Science heralded him as one of the most prominent medical researchers of his day. He made the cover of Time in 1949. 

He’s remembered today as a pioneer of chemotherapy. Starting in 1980, the American Assoication for Cancer Research gave the prestigious Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award to the best investigator of cancer research. 

When in 2003, one of these recipients was PR, and he rejected the award and lodged a complaint against the AACR. Even the donor who funded the award hadn’t known Rhoad’s legacy. 

And that’s how you hide an empire. 

10 Fortress America

America wanted all it’s territory to model daddy america, but didnt want to anyone into its play pin.

They all saluted the US flag. They studied English language and US history in school. Their money had georgie’s face on it. They observed US holidays, even the anniversaries when we took them over (something they, PR in particular, would use as a reason to attempt assassinations of government officials). All was hunky dory, except on the mainland people barely knew about the territories, where they were, who they were filled with, if they were apart of the states or not. Hunky. Dorey. 

We didnt write about them much in the papers. Stories about Albania far outstripped mentions of Hawaii and Guam. Novelists took a similar theme, and there were many books on the mainland, but the only territorial book of note was anthropologist Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (stubbornly named sans the legal name of the territory, American Samoa). 

This chapter is really a discourse on how other empires treated their territories vs how the US did. How they had colonial buildings in their capital and we didn’t. How they acknowledged and defended theirs and we swept ours under the rug. How they had trained administrators to run theirs, and we’d run through 40 governors in one territory in as many years. Sure, colonials complained, but also sure, mainlanders were deaf.

The Pan American Freedom League was founded to represent the territories, but not all of them. It wasn’t concerned with the far off Puerto Rico, Hawaii, or the Philippines, but with Cuba, Haiti and Mexico. 

FDR established the Division of Terriroteis and Island Possessions within the Interior Department in 1934, with all but Guam and Samoa under its authority. He appointed Earnest Gruening of the anti-imperial league to lead it, seeing it fitting for that reason and more. He was also the white man responsible for campaigning to prevent The Birth of a Nation to open in Boston, and a founding member of the American Birth Control League, the organization that would become planned parenthood. 

Few outsiders mastered Caribbean affairs as he had. He hated the bullying of weaker states, mainly the Latin American ones. He told FDR a democracy shouldn’t have any colonies. FDR told him to find a way to develop it into something that wasn’t territorial. 

As we annexed other countries, the sidelined empires of the world through up tariffs to protect themselves. As the trade barriers rose, global trade collapsed and fell 2/3rds between 1929-1932, which meant these large economies we’re kind of strong armed into subsist largely on their own domestic product. 

Domestic was a key word here because it included colonies, since one of the empire’s chief benefits was the unrestricted economic access it brought to faraway places. 

Domestication of product mattered to the major imperial powers - Dutch, French, British - that they could still get tropical products from their Asian colonies, and it matter that the industrial countries without empires - German, Italian, Japanese - who were kinda competitors, couldn’t. 

The US was good on oil, cotton, iron, coal, and other minerals here locally, things other countries found hard to secure. We/they could still get rubber/tin from British ally Malaya, and could still get coconut oil from Guam and Hemp from the Philippines for rope and paper (hence Manila envelope). 

The point was we were way more self-contained than other empires, because the main thing we needed from our colonies was sugar, and even then, we could still make it local from Louisiana beets, which is actually where we ended up getting most of our sugar in the interwar years (weird phrase).

The depression really just highlighted we hadn’t done much with our empire in the 30 years since we’d been building it. Sure, we used colonies as naval bases and not so kosher laboratories, but colonial products weren’t integral to the us economy. 

It started to actually be perceived as a threat because colonial sugar was competing with mainland sugar, so farmers lobbied. Gruening objected the lobbying, testifying against discrimination, saying the lobbying was suggesting there were two Americas, one continental and one offshore. 

The beet growers were joined by west coast labor unions worried about Filipinos displacing them, since as US nationals they could enter the mainland and do cheap work.

Japan, having invaded Manchuria, was advancing across Southeast Asia and the consensus seemed to be, including FDR, that rather than absorbing the Philippines trade, it’s migrants, defending it against Japan, it might be better to call it a wash and just get rid of it.

The Filipinos didnt see this as a bad thing, because it meant their independence, or, at least it meant that for most of them. Manuel Quezon, president of the Philippine Senate, once one of Aguinaldo’s staff, was a slippery flip flopper. To his Filipino constituents, he’d say “I’d rather have a government run like hell than a government run like heaven by Americans.” 

The thing was, he had to play both sides because he also knew the Philippines depended on the mainland as about 80% of its trade was going there. This is what the US did. It stole an entire civilization, then addicted its economy to american imports. Not only that, but territories weren't allowed to develop their own militaries, so independence meant being laid bare.

This became a bigger problem when congress passed a bill to give independence within 8 years. Quezon was stuck between a rock and a hard place. It wasn’t true indendence, though. Rather, it permitted Filipinos to establish a commonwealth, like Britain did with Australia and Canada. If it was a good commonwealth boy for another 10 years, then it could be free. 

Gruening tried to draft something like this, but for PR, but it was even farther from freedom than the Philippine Independence Act, because with 95% of PRs economy propped up by US importing, a sudden tariff would fuck it all up. 

Quezon approached Britain about taking the Philippines in if the US threw it to the curb, while also scrambling to create a military to protect itself if it needed protecting. To do so, he enlisted the US army chief of staff, the only official to feel any real connection to the Philippines: General Douglas MacArther. 

Doug exercised more effective authority in foreign relations than perhaps anyone in US history. A distant cousin to both FDR and Churchill, he lived in the Philippines for 14 years without returning. His father Arther had been a governor during the Philippine War. 

All he wanted was to establish a force to withstand the Japanese threat if it came ashore, mainly because most people didnt give a shit what happened to the Philippines, or Hawaii. As American prepared for battle with Japan, we thought to deport or intern the whole of the Japanese population in Hawaii, then well over 1/3 of its population. 

Doug took his favorite aide, Dwight Eisenhower, who came up with the idea to repurpose old US rifles from the Philippine war, most of which hadn’t ever been fired. MacArther would eventually leave the US military amidst Eisenhower’s fear that establishing a Filipino army would provoke US and Japan alike, and he became the self-titled field Marshall of the Philippine Commonwealth. It didnt stop him from asking DC for $5 per Filipino trainee, something which seemed meager against the $220 per trained subsidy given to the national guard. 

Gruening is still around during this time fucking with his PR New Deal. He created political enemies, which led to his Siberian exile (colonial governor of Alaska). Once there he wanted an island bridge from Alaska to Siberia, but it fell on deaf ears. 

It took the Japanese moving into French Indochina in 1941 to get congress off its ass. They finally saw the value in fortifying the pacific facing territory. FDR agreed to send B-17s and other shit to the Philippines, but they didnt get there in time. 

MacArther was able to amass a fleet of 120k soldiers, and only 35 of the flying fortresses had arrived. It was too late though, because November of 1941 came fast. 

11 Warfare State

“War is gods way of teaching Americans geography.” Jon Stewart. Pearl Harbor was a good example of this. 

After the attack, war planners could finally see all the hubbub Gruening was trying to tell them: that they needed military support in Alaska along the Aleutian Islands. They learned about how our logo map puts japan allll the way on the right, in the east, when really its a hop, skip and a jump to Alaska and Hawaii. 

Japan attacking the territories also showed mainlanders how far Alaska was from everything else. FDRs administration set out to build a road to it, something that would also help in sending supplies to then ally Soviet Union. The road was longer than the route from NYC to Dallas and waded heavy into Canadian territory. Those sent to it needed shelter as in the first winter temperatures dropped to -70F.

With the road they sent 12k troops, a third of which were the first black troops beyond the mainland for war. 

Alaskan natives were amazed at the technology coming through to them, but just like with the Native Americans, we brought our diseases with us. When the road was finished in November of 1942, it cost 20m, which was fine because the military, for the first time, didnt need money. They’d even leave bulldozers that broke down on the side of the road because it was faster than stopping to fix them. 

The reason we had money was because after Pearl Harbor our military occupied and declared martial law on Hawaii. The war overall was great for the economy, even brining new institutions like price restrictions, wage controls, rationing, income tax, war bonds and conscription into daily life. Life bustled more in the territories than the mainland, though. 

The army claimed hundreds of thousands of acres of land, and during the war held over a third of Oahu. 

Citizens had to follow war zone restrictions (University of Hawaii graduates processed in cap and gown and gas mask). A navy secretary considered Hawaii enemy territory as more than a third of their population was of Japanese ancestry. The forced registration, fingerprinting and vaccination of all Hawaiian locals was the first compulsory vaccination and fingerprinting in the US. 

Martial law meant the Office of the Military Governor (OMG) or One Mighty God operated without any legislative check or presidential oversight. They set up provost courts and fined and jailed locals for almost anything. Of the 20k cases in 1942, 98% were guilty verdicts. You could be tried for not showing up to work. Or 30 days in jail for leaving your car keys in the ignition. If it wasn’t fines or jail time, defendants were directed to donate blood or purchase war bonds.

This is how we kept the military whole for those 3 years of martial law, until eventually the Supreme Court declared the martial law discriminatory. 

After Japan seized the philippines, it went for Alaska, something mainlanders, and even congress, were unaware of because of the strict censorship surrounding the ordeal. It’s known as the forgotten war. They also were unaware of the Aleut internment. 

We know about the mainland Japanese internment of the time, something we’re still ashamed of and something that led to the only reparations ever given out (20k per internee). Some 112k people in 1942 were placed into camps for about 3 years. 

Hawaii was the second instance of quasi-internment, and the third was Alaskas Command ordering the native of the Aleutian Islands west of Unimak and Pribilof to be removed and sent further inland, although the white residents were allowed to stay. 1k Aleuts were shoved hastily onto ships and deposited onto abandoned mining camps along southeast Alaska. 

This was internment on a new level. They ate next to the toilet and there was no place to bathe or wash one’s clothes. The buildings had no lights or sewage or clean water. These were citizens who had willingly abandoned their homes, and they stayed here for years. It killed 10% of them. They weren’t the enemy like the Hawaiians, but it was easier for the military to leave them there than to take them back. 

What’s even less known is that we interned Japanese in the Philippines. On the day of the attack MacArther grabbed 30k of Japanese living or even born in the philippines and rounded them up. Soldiers raided. Citizens and Soldiers alike raped Japanese women. Police in Manila put 100 internees into a truck during an air raid hoping Japanese planes would bomb it. Guards in Davao took their frustration out on soldiers without reason, shooting them randomly. 

This internment, however, only lasted a few weeks. 

When japan invaded, the trapped local Japanese switched sides and joined the Japanese because of how inhumanlely they’d been treated, which was different than the response of the blacks or the Hawaiians or the Alaskans. 

In Alaska in particular, Gruening asked locals to join the army, and they were called Gruening’s Guerillas. It was a surprise, as they were likely to take up arms against the soldiers who’d enforced their strict Jim Crow laws. He gained 20k soldiers, some of whom would go on to win medals of honor in europe to prove themselves to the US. They were the territorial guard for most of the time, though, along Alaska’s west coast, but continued their service well into the Cold War. 

12 There are Times When Men Have to Die

Hawaii and Alaska prepared for fights that never really came. Japan’s ideas was to attack the major targets - Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, and Hong Kong at the same time of day, dawn, but dawn was hard because it wasn’t dawn at the same time in all those places.

When they hit the Philippines, MacArthur seemed to do nothing for hours. They took Guam fast, then Thailand, then Wake Island, then Hong Kong. Singapore in February, Batavia and Rangoon in March. In 3 months Japan brought the Dutch, British, and US empires to heel.

MacArthur had forces in the Philippines fall back, something that required many, many bridges. They left Manila for a peaceful Japanese invasion, but not before salting the earth. The men were on half rations initially, and not long after were lucky to get quarter rations. Eating their own animals resulted in dysentery and hookworm.

FDR promised the locals and GIs alike that there would be a reckoning.

The Japanese propagandists began dropping flyers over the soldiers, trying to convince Filipino soldiers to abandon the imperialist Americans for their side. 

From america, most people only heard about the war in Germany, that’s where the news was, and sometimes talked over the airwaves that the philippines had already lost, when in fact the war was very much still going on. 

“How typically american to writhe in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin while a daughter is being raped in the back room.”

There are times when men have to die. 

When the US abandoned the Philippines, it took the gold and burned the money, and dumped the silver pesos into Manila Bay. 

The events were made into a movie which made america pay attention. 

All the Filipinos who couldn’t abscond with the military were essentially walked to their death by the japanese. Except when they portray the movies, it’s the US soldiers who are the heroes. The Filipino characters didnt even get lines in their own movies. 

After the Japanese came to Manila and set up shop, they changed all the presidential street names to japanese names. They changed the names of Batavia and Singapore and Guam and Wake. The US empire was uprooted and the Japanese laid down in its place. 

In some places, this invasion was a warm welcome to natives, like in Burma. Japanese propagandists reminded Filipinos of the long US history of empire. Japan campaigned on a rule of Asia for the asiatics. It was a nice sentiment accompanied with a genocidal threat if Filipinos didnt stand in line. Out of line pretty much meant anything against the interests of the military, which pretty much meant anything period. Public beheadings without trial were not uncommon. 

Just as Germany was penned in, Japan was similarly boxed by empires: British, Dutch, US and Chinese, or, the “ABCD encirclement.” This was bad because japans access to oil, rubber, tin, and food depended on foreign markets. If they wanted to keep growing their economy, they needed to take the Philippines. 

They instituted a command economy because they were so short on resources, forcing farmers to sell their produce to the government, at a discount, to be distributed to the military in rations. 

As in 1899, guerrillas established shadow governments, and even universities with transferable credits.