How to Hide an Empire

In late 1945, counting the occupations, 51 percent of the population of the Greater United States lived outside the states. But by 1960, after Hawai‘i and Alaska entered the union, that number had fallen to around 2 percent, which is roughly where it has been ever since.

The longer the war went on, the more bases the United States took. For some, as in Latin America, it negotiated deals: building roads and extending aid in exchange for leases. Others it claimed from its allies as a matter of wartime exigency.

In 1946 the Truman administration appointed a Puerto Rican as governor, Muñoz Marín’s colleague Jesús T. Piñero. In 1948, Congress allowed Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor. Muñoz Marín won easily, and he would keep the position until 1964. Now, holding the highest political office in the colony, he could move Puerto Rico down the new polit

It wasn’t just what Asians thought, it was what they could do. The tight arms controls that had been a persistent feature of colonial life broke down entirely as the war spread weapons all around Asia.

Marshall’s plan to keep men overseas provoked a furious reaction. Families of servicemen blasted their representatives with letters and buried congressional offices in baby shoes, all bearing tags reading BRING DADDY HOME. On a single day in December, Truman’s office estimated that it had received sixty thousand postcards demanding the troops’ retu

Nineteen fifty-nine was the year of statehood. The next year, 1960, a Kenyan student met a Kansan one in the Russian class at the University of Hawaii. The two married—an interracial marriage illegal in two dozen states at the time—and had a son, who would grow up partly in Hawai‘i, partly in Indonesia. In typical Hawaiian fashion, his profoundly m

Wenzell Brown wasn’t the only one to recognize Puerto Rico’s incendiary potential. The celebrated journalist John Gunther gasped when he saw the island’s crowded slums. The sight offered a “paralyzing jolt to anyone who believes in American standards of progress and civilization,” he wrote. Life magazine ran an exposé of the “cesspool of Puerto Ric

Fong and Inouye proved to be, just as white supremacists feared, champions of civil rights. And had the segregationists gazed farther into the future, they would have been still more troubled by something else taking place in Hawai‘i at the time.

The problem was that statehood, unlike other concessions to decolonization, required Congress’s assent. And here Truman came up against a hard fact. In party politics, the two territories were balanced, it being widely assumed that Hawai‘i would be a Republican state and Alaska a Democratic one (exactly wrong, it turned out). But their admission wo

Puerto Rico suffered from many maladies, but, in the near-unanimous view of mainlanders, they all stemmed from a single root. The island’s women, as one official put it, “kept shooting children like cannon balls at the rigid walls of their economy.” Mainlanders lamented the overcrowding on the small island, which by 1950 had nearly 650 inhabitants