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

The rapid growth of the white settler population is connected to “the extraordinary de-population of the land’s indigenous inhabitants” (36). The arrival of the Europeans provoked a “profound demographic crisis,” which included diseases like smallpox and measles, war, and dislocation. By the early 19th century, historians believe the Indigenous population faced a 90% decline.

The way the Indigenous people met the Europeans differed. Some, like the Cherokee, were perceived as “the whiteman in manners, morals and religion” (37), leading to treaties. However, the ongoing settler expansion made the existing agreements difficult to maintain. “Squatter onslaught” in places like Georgia overrode the Supreme Court declaring Georgia’s attempts to gain Cherokee land illegal. Nonetheless, Georgia split the land in Cherokee Nation and distributed it to white settlers. Then came the Trail of Tears, which forcefully removed the Cherokees from their land and moved them to Oklahoma, with thousands dying from the elements, hunger, and disease along the way (38).

Initially, President Andrew Jackson envisioned the West as “something resembling an Indian colony” (38), separated from white settlements. His proposed act was to “formally divide the country into unequal parts, a settler part and an Indian part” (39). Some, like John Quincy Adams, considered this proposal one of an empire, not a republic, while others worried about the racial implications, like having “a full-blood savage” (39) in government. The proposal for Western Territory was rejected by Congress but revealed a tendency towards border policing. Then, Indian Country lost Nebraska and Kansas as the “[e]ager white settlers streamed in” (41). The Indigenous people were forced to move until “Indian Country” “had been reduced to its southern tip, present-day Oklahoma” (42). As time went on, “the government acquiesced to the settlers’ demands, squeezing Indigenous American land claims over the territory’s eastern side via allotment and distributing the western side to whites” (43). In 1907, Oklahoma became a state, making “[t]he final extirpation of Indian Country” (44) an event of profound significance for the Indigenous population of the United States.

Historically, borders changed often. It is after World War II that a certain level of geopolitical stability made “the shapes of countries seem inevitable” (46). Such stability was not the case in the 19th-century United States, as the country started annexing multiple small islands both in the Pacific and in the Caribbean in 1857, in addition to its westward expansion. The islands were uninhabited and held no strategic value at that time, but did have guano—the excrement of seabirds, like cormorants and pelicans.

Guano was important to 19th-century agriculture because of America’s growing population. Its nitrogen-rich nature and affordability made guano popular among farmers as a fertilizer. Guano collecting was “the single worst job you could have in the nineteenth century” (53). Workers lived in crowded conditions and ended up with respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses. Approximately 68 guano ships mutinied between 1847 and 1874 due to poor working conditions or even being kidnapped to work in the industry.

In one case, Navassa Phosphate Company operating on Navassa, an island next to Haiti, relied on African American labor. When violence erupted between white officers out of a dispute between a worker and an overseer, five white officers died. The alleged culprits were brought back to Baltimore, where the community raised funds for a good defense team. The United States lacked jurisdiction to convict the rioters because “Navassa was foreign soil” (54) according to the defense. Questions of corporate interests on American territory arose (55). The question made it all the way to the Supreme Court. The rioters, who received death sentences, had their sentences commuted by President Benjamin Harrison because it was “inexcusable that American laborers should be left without access to any Government officer or tribunal for their protection” (56).

Overall, the guano era “left three legacies, all of which would shape the fate of the Greater United States” (56). First, the Guano Islands Act and the Supreme Court ruling that the US law applied to Navassa meant that “the borders of the United States needn’t be confined to the continent” (56). Second, the islands became strategically important for the “pointillist empire” as airfields after World War II (56). Third, the immediate impact was agricultural, as guano was one of the fertilizers that kept agriculture sustainable until the invention of fertilizer manufacturing by Fritz Haber. The Haber-Bosch process meant that ammonia synthesis would yield infinite amounts of fertilizer. Haber went on to work in the weapons industry and invented poison gas for German use in World War I. After the war, Haber invented Zyklon A, which was then modified into Zyklon B in the Holocaust. Haber was married to Clara Haber (née Immerwahr), the first female scientist in Germany with a chemistry doctorate. Her cousin, Max, was the author’s great-grandfather.

Most high-level politicians did not participate in the settlement boom, but Teddy Roosevelt was an exception. Roosevelt founded a ranch in Dakota Territory in 1883, leaving the east coast (59). He lived in a log cabin, hunted, and wrote books like The Wilderness Hunter (1893). Yet, “there was something buffoonish about Thee’s mountain-man routine—an overgrown boy playing cowboys and Indians” (60).

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner and Roosevelt subscribed to the “frontier thesis,” which posited the frontier as “the great regenerating force in US life—the source of democracy, individualism, practicality, and freedom” (62). They feared that, as the frontier was conquered and disappeared, the character of American life would change too. At the same time, historian Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890), emphasizing strategic sea exploration linked to maritime commerce and overseas naval bases. Mahan had a significant impact on Roosevelt’s thinking.

In the Spanish-American War (1898), Roosevelt “envisioned an all-out attack on the Spanish Empire” (66). In May 1898, Commodore George Dewey either captured or sank every Spanish ship in the Battle of Manila Bay. Roosevelt commanded one of the three volunteer cavalry regiments that were approved by Congress. The Battle for the San Juan Heights in Cuba proved to be important for Roosevelt and his Rough Riders. After this battle, the Americans defeated the Spanish troops in Cuba as well as Puerto Rico. One of the principal reasons for American victory is the fact that Spain had been dealing with colonial unrest that weakened it substantially, while the US was a latecomer “supplying the burst of force at the end of a long, bloody conflict that had already nearly destroyed the Spanish Empire” (70). The surrender agreements, however, were between the US and Spain, rather than, for instance, Cuba and Spain: “The war may have begun as an empire-wide revolt by Spain’s colonial subjects, but it ended as the ‘Spanish-American War’” (72). The US occupied Cuba as a result.