How to Hide an Empire

The Guano Islands Act, the Supreme Court’s ruling, and President Harrison’s backing of that ruling collectively established that the borders of the United States needn’t be confined to the continent.

What did work was guano. That term can refer to any bird or bat feces used as fertilizer, but the guano on everyone’s minds was the nitrogen-rich droppings of cormorants, boobies, and pelicans on the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. Islands make attractive rookeries for seabirds in general. The Chinchas had the additional virtue that they har

As his five-dollar name suggests, Roosevelt was the scion of the Atlantic elite. He was born into the New York aristocracy—his father helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. Educated at Harvard and a rising star in the world of reform politics, “Thee,” as he signed his letters, was as pedigreed an eas

Oscar Collazo received a death sentence (later commuted to life in prison). Back on the island, Luis Muñoz Marín assured the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover that he’d do everything in his power to eradicate the “lawless lunatics.” His police rounded up more than a thousand purported nationalists and tried them on various charges for violating the Gag Law. Th

A bill granting the Philippines independence in eight years sailed through the House in forty minutes, with Democrats for it voting unanimously. Panicked, Quezon arranged to have it blocked by the Philippine Legislature. But this was not ultimately a tenable position for the head of the Nationalist Party, so he supported a nearly identical bill tha

Rubber—once the cause of war, colonization, and mass death—became a commodity that Washington could be cavalier about. In 1952 a blue-ribbon commission convened to assess U.S. raw material needs concluded that rubber shortages could no longer pose a serious threat to national security. Natural rubber, coming mainly from Indonesia, Thailand, and Mal

In other words, if you looked up at the end of 1945 and saw a U.S. flag overhead, odds are that you weren’t seeing it because you lived in a state. You were more likely colonized or living in occupied territory. Probably somewhere in the Pacific.

Eventually the Beatles themselves would join the movement that began with the march on Aldermaston. Paul McCartney appeared on television in 1964 calling for a ban on nuclear weapons. Three years later, John Lennon offered his own protest of the United States’ basing system. “Look what they do here,” he complained. “They’re spending billions on nuc

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