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

With the history of slavery, Indigenous American displacement, and immigration from all over the world, race has remained an important feature of American society and politics. By focusing on the Greater United States, which includes Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, Daniel Immerwahr suggests that “race has been even more central to US history than is usually supposed” (11, emphasis added). The relationship between race, American identity, and the US Empire is a consistent trajectory from colonial America until the present.

On the far end of the spectrum, the author discusses the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Americans through the Indian Removal Act (1830), the racial segregation of Indigenous Alaskans not unlike that of African Americans in the pre-civil rights south, and the imprisonment of Japanese Americans and Indigenous Aleutians during World War II. The parallels between the forced race-based removal in the 19th and 20th centuries are part of a single pattern rooted in racial stereotypes and population management of the “undesirables.” One of the darkest moments in How to Hide an Empire is the 1931 letter by Cornelius Rhoads, which not only engages in racial stereotypes but also reveals his desire to exterminate the entire population of Puerto Rico. Even after Rhoads, one of the key roles for Puerto Rico in US history has been to serve “as subjects for experimental medical research, from anemia to mustard gas” (247).

A less aggressive form of racism involved a paternalistic attitude toward people of non-European descent. The perceived Anglo-Saxon, Protestant superiority fused with the condescending pursuit of civilizing non-Europeans was not unlike earlier forms of colonialism. For instance, Thomas Jefferson thought that the diverse population of the Louisiana Territory was as “incapable of self-government as children” (30). Some 19th-century government policies toward Indigenous Americans led to concerns about “a full-blood savage” (39) in government. A century later, Woodrow Wilson still considered nonwhite people “‘children,’ requiring ‘training’ before they could rule themselves” (116). Wilson also blocked the League of Nations’ verbiage about racial equality, and his call for self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference only applied to Europe. These attitudes underpinned the treatment of the overseas colonial subjects and counteracted their search for autonomy from the United States, as was the case with Philippine independence. Similarly, Douglas MacArthur and his staff of the American occupation forces in Japan perceived their role as one of a “righteous mission” spreading Western superiority.

Another relevant aspect is the difference between the center (the mainland) and the periphery (the overseas territories). It is this difference that serves as the source for the title of the book, How to Hide an Empire. Some considered mainland America to be “more American” than Hawaii and Alaska, even after the two became states. Others were simply not aware of what the overseas territories were, confusing Puerto Rico and Costa Rica. Prior to making his announcement after Japan’s Pearl Harbor bombing, Franklin D. Roosevelt changed his speech to emphasize the seriousness of the situation through the fact that Hawaii was, in fact, American, to convince the public who may have envisioned the islands as some far-off place. At the same time, Pearl Harbor came to symbolize World War II on American soil rather than the full-scale Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines—an even farther place. The vignette featuring an American soldier traveling across an ocean to arrive in the Philippines during World War II, risking his life and yet not recognizing that the islands were American territory, encapsulates the dichotomy between the center and the periphery, whiteness and nonwhiteness, and thus embodies the hidden American empire.