Daniel Immerwahr's "How to Hide An Empire" [Something Interesting #53]

“The history of the U.S. is the history of empire.” - Daniel Immerwahr

Last September, I borrowed an audiobook from my local library that I still can't stop thinking about and would highly recommend everyone check out: Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire. It's an incredibly detailed yet episodic book about the various territories the United States has brought into its orbit and how mainlanders tend to routinely forget and misunderstand the relationship these places have with the rest of the country.

I've not read through the print/eBook copy yet but will do so sometime later this year, yet the audiobook version is excellent on its own with Luis Moreno providing excellent narration. I also spent a lot of the listen jotting down notes and reading more into the events and situations described. If you choose to do so, I'm providing a condensed version of the major topics I captured with hyperlinks to their Wikipedia entries/context links for further investigation.

Again: amazing book, well worth checking out.

The audiobook

Photo by Luke Michael (Unsplash)

More Context Info

Full notes are here but be mindful that they're a bit disjointed... The below list is a more streamlined/accesible version of the Google Doc copy.

Chapter 2

• Daniel Boone

• "Manifest destiny"

• Westward expansion during post-revolution United States

Chapter 3

• Guano Island Acts

• Peruvian nitrate monopoly

• Fritz Haber & Clara Immerwahr (Daniel Immerwahr's relatives)

Chapter 4

• The "Frontier Thesis"

• Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power upon History

• Battle of Manila Bay

• Spanish-American War

• Battle of San Juan Hill

• The Rough Riders

Chapter 5

• Annexation of Hawaii

• William Jennings Bryan

• The American Anti-Imperialist League

• "Insular Cases"

Chapter 6

• 1899 Battle of Manila

• Philippine-American War

• The Moro Rebellion

Chapter 7

• Pedro Albizu Campos

Chapter 8

• Daniel Burnham

• William Cameron Forbes

• Juan Arellano

Chapter 9

• Dr. Bailey K. Ashford and Dr. Cornelius Rhoads

• The work of Jay Katz decades later

• The independence movement in 1930s-1950s Puerto Rico

Chapter 10

• Ernest Gruening

• The creation of Philippines as a commonwealth

• Gen. Douglas MacArthur

Chapter 11

• Martial law in Hawaii during WWII

• Alaska as the “hidden front”

• The Aleuts’ internment during the fighting and the miserable conditions they lived in

• Sen. Daniel Inouye

Chapter 12

• The Pacific War

• W.L. White’s They Were Expendable

• The Battle of Bataan

• The Battle of Manila (WWII)

Chapter 13

• The U.S. occupation of Japan post-WWII

• The (surprisingly never-amended) Constitution of Japan

Chapter 14

• The Treaty of Manila

• Domino effect from Filipino independence throughout the 1950s

• Admission of Alaska and Hawaii as states into the United States

Chapter 15

• Luis Muñoz Marín

• Puerto Rico as a testing ground for contraceptives and sterilization efforts during the 1940s-1950s

• Rise of Puerto Rican migration to New York

• The attempted revolution in Puerto Rico

• The attempted assassination of President Truman

• Operation Bootstrap

Chapter 16

• The concept of Synthetica

  
  

Chapter 17

• Development of the Panama Canal

• The issue of malaria

• Quinine & DEET

• The island-hopping campaign in the Pacific

• Samuel Morse’s original message using Morse code in 1840s

• Voice of America during the Cold War & Radio Free Europe

Chapter 18

• Importance of standardization due to the Baltimore fire of 1904

• The creation of National Bureau of Standards

• Reframing of Herbert Hoover as great bureaucrat despite being a weak president

• Screw-thread standardization

• Ottawa Conference of 1945 and the creation of the International Organization for Standardization

• Example of A440 tone vs. French pitch to emphasize standardization

• The story of the “Empire of the Red Octagon,” about global acceptance of a red octagon as the universal Stop sign

• The U.S. refusal of adopting the metric system

Chapter 19

• Winston Churchill promotion of “Basic”

• Robert Latham Owen’s “Global Alphabet”

• Manuel L. Quezon

• Tagalog as the official Filipino language

• The spread of English as a lingua franca

• Interlingua

• ASCII

• Lingual frenectomies in South Korea

Chapter 20

• Axel Wenner-Gren, designer of monorail and founder of Telmex

• The rats of Howland Island

• Placing U.S. military bases on islands

• Half of Guam is military bases

• Okinawa “is the base”

• Swan Islands in Honduras, home of Radio Swan during the Bay of Pigs situation

• Apparently Allen Dulles was a fan of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books…

• Removal of inhabitants of the Marshall Islands at Bikini Atoll prior to A-bomb testing

• The Lucky Dragon incident in Japan that inspired Godzilla

• Thule Air Base in Greenland as a counter to Soviet expansion

• The 1968 Thule accident & the 1966 Palomares incident

Chapter 21

• The British protest against nuclear weapons at Aldermaston

• Gerald Holtom's creation of the peace symbol

• The rise of U.K. "Merseybeat" acts from Liverpool, courtesy of nearby U.S.-occupied Burtonwood base

• W. Edwards Deming, popular with Japanese engineers as "patron saint of quality assurance"

• Protests in Japan include the 1959-1960 base renewal treaty & the 1970 protests in Koza

• U.S. returned most of Okinawa to Japan in 1972

• Japan as beginning of U.S. deindustrialization, with example of Masaru Ibuka & the creation of Sony

• The rise in U.S. anti-Japanese resentment during 1970s/1980s (examples include Donald Trump complaining in late 1980s and the 1992 Michael Crichton novel Rising Sun)

• Akio Morita (Sony CEO) living in NYC and his anti-American turn in late 1980s writing The Japan That Can Say No

Chapter 22

• The story of Aramco and the origin of the bin Ladin family fortune from their work with the U.S.

• The 1979 USSR invasion of Afghanistan bolstered Osama bin Laden's radicalization and the origin of al-Qaeda

• The 1991 Persian Gulf War

• Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf's campaign against Iraqi forces (4th largest in the world at the time?!)

• The 1998 Africa attacks & 2000 U.S. Cole bombing

• Operation Infinite Reach

• Smart bombs & drones in post-9/11 warfare ("warheads on foreheads")

• Guantanamo Bay Naval Base as a detention center (nicknamed "Strawberry Fields") & the use of other black sites

• Writ of habeas corpus filed against use of detention centers in 2004, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court

Conclusion

• Saipan and the garment sweatshops as part of Commonwealth of Northern Marianas (“a standing loophole”)

• Northern Marianas hiring lobby Jack Abramhoff to persuade Republicans to keep it that way following similar tactics used by Abramhoff for Choctaw tribe clients until found guilty of fraud in 2007

• Issues of 2008 campaign questioning those born outside mainland U.S.:

  • John McCain born in 1936 Panama Canal Zone before 1937 naturalization declaration

  • Sarah Palin was then married to a part-Yup'ik husband and member of Alaska Independence Party

  • Barack Obama was born in Hawaii but had no connections to the Hawaii pro-independence movement yet still dogged as “other" [birtherism starting with disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters before picked up by the Republicans]

• More recent reminders of U.S. territories seen with mainland indifference:

  • North Korea threatened to bomb Guam during August 2017 but no concern except for service members stationed there

  • Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico during September 2017