6

GOING GLOBAL

When you visit the Presidio of San Francisco today, you can imagine why the Spanish Empire decided to build its northernmost military outpost in the Western Hemisphere there when Spanish troops arrived in 1776. The base sits atop a dramatic, breezy hill overlooking the narrow mouth of massive San Francisco Bay, near one side of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. The bay is the largest on the West Coast and has since given birth to the city that bears its name as well as the neighboring metropolises of Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, and the heart of the tech economy, Silicon Valley.

U.S. forces first occupied the base in 1846, around the start of the war with Mexico. The Presidio quickly became one of the Army’s largest and most important bases in North America. It remained that way until the Pentagon closed the base in 1994 amid antimilitarism protests and the consolidation of bases following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Since that time the Presidio has been converted into almost 1,500 acres of verdant parkland, forest, hiking trails, and a rare coastal prairie grassland integrated with civilian housing, schools, museums, restaurants, a hotel, and office space. Parts of the base remain as a National Park Service tourist site. On a sunny and typically windy spring day in San Francisco, I visited the old Commandant’s Headquarters. Beneath a parking lot lie archaeological remains of the work camp where enslaved and other indigenous Californians built the adobe headquarters beginning in 1776. Nearby I saw the houses of Officers’ Row, built in 1862 to replace some of the original adobe buildings inherited from the Spanish and Mexican militaries. Pershing Hall is the large Georgian-style bachelor officers’ housing built in 1903, as tens of thousands of troops were deploying from the Presidio to the Philippines. Another intact building is where military officials directed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

As I walked the grounds, I stumbled across several Spanish imperial cannons displayed around the base as war trophies. An iron San Domingo was cast almost four hundred years earlier in 1628, in Spanish-controlled Peru. Another was an Ordóñez gun. Filipino rebels captured it from their Spanish colonial occupiers, only for U.S. forces to seize it while attacking Filipino troops at Subic Bay in 1899. Newspaper owner, editor, and yellow journalism proponent William Randolph Hearst acquired the cannon and had it transported back to San Francisco. Hearst’s New York Journal helped push the country into war in 1898. The city of San Francisco originally installed the cannon, appropriately enough, in Columbus Square Park, before the Army moved it to the Presidio in 1973.1

The cannons from Peru and Subic Bay symbolize the continuity of U.S. Empire both from empires past and from periods of continental to extracontinental conquest. It’s no coincidence that U.S. forces seized a gun forged in a major colonial capital of the empire that once dominated the Western Hemisphere. It is no coincidence that Hearst acquired a gun captured by U.S. forces in a war his newspaper helped start and that he transported that gun, like a souvenir, back to one of the launchpads of the war, San Francisco. The U.S. Empire has literally inherited the presidios and other bases, the cannons and weaponry, and the land of empires past—Spanish, French, British, and Russian, among others.

While the conquest of the Philippines and Guam—the other distant Spanish-controlled island in the Pacific—may seem to be a major break in U.S. history and patterns of U.S. imperialism, these conquests were a relatively smooth extension of U.S. imperialism. In North America, forts on and beyond the borders of the thirteen original states helped launch wars that enabled the conquest of more territory, which enabled the creation of new frontier forts, which enabled new wars and territorial conquest. There should be little surprise that the Presidio, one of the bases seized from Mexico during the midcentury war, would later become one of the major launchpads for the U.S. war in the Philippines. The invasion and seizure of Cuba was likewise launched from the port of Tampa Bay, which the United States had taken from the Spanish Empire early in the nineteenth century. Within weeks of U.S. forces’ landing at Guantánamo Bay, it would be the deployment point for invading and seizing Spanish-controlled Puerto Rico.

There was nothing inevitable about the seizure of the Philippines or Cuba or Puerto Rico or about the succession of U.S. wars enabling greater conquests. But the territorial conquest and these wars were no absentminded or accidental “stumble” into empire either, as some historians and pundits have suggested. The expansion and conquest of the United States across vast Native American lands make it unsurprising that the United States would expand into the waters of the Caribbean and the Pacific, near and far alike. It is less surprising still given that for more than a century prior to 1898, the U.S. military, U.S. businesses, and individual U.S. investors were active far beyond the bounds of North America.

Many histories and popular myths about the U.S. war with Spain in 1898 depict President William McKinley’s “splendid little war” and the subsequent acquisition of colonies in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Wake Island as the United States’ one flirtation with empire, or the “Great Aberration,” as historian Samuel Flagg Bemis called it.2 This was the age of imperialism, the story often goes. The European powers were carving up Africa and other parts of the globe as colonies. The United States, this version says, got in on the game in a passing “flight of carelessness.” Even if perhaps the country was guilty of dabbling in colonialism, at least it freed the Cuban people from the Spanish Empire in the process. Plus, compared to the British Empire in India or the French in West Africa, the collection of colonies could be portrayed as “too small to count as a true empire.”³

“This compelling moral fable,” writes Thomas McCormick, “of a little sin and a great redemption enabled later historians to picture subsequent American wars, both hot and cold, as confrontations fought with clean hands by an exceptional nation, untainted by ulterior motives of aggression and aggrandizement, seeking merely to defend and promote democracy and civilization against Old World Pathologies.”4 A more critical telling of the history thus holds that the War of 1898 was the start of a new form of U.S. overseas empire. This was the fundamental turning point, when the United States began to acquire colonies outside North America for the first time.

Neither of these accounts is accurate. The 1898 U.S. war with Spain and the seizure of colonies outside the continent was no accident, nor was it the emergence of a new form of U.S. Empire. Rather, the war was the culmination of the first period of U.S. imperialism postindependence, which saw the country expand across the continent with the help of U.S. Army forts and near-continuous war. Politicians and other economic and military elites had an interest in seizing territory or otherwise extending U.S. influence beyond the continental United States from the country’s earliest days. Coveted lands included Cuba and parts of Asia. Despite the original thirteen states’ location confined to the East Coast of North America, “from the first days of the Republic,” historian Steven Hahn explains, “power in the Pacific had been central to the continental ambitions of American leaders and policy makers.” These elites were “well aware of the already thriving trade in eastern and southern Asia—and of the intense jockeying among the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch” for their cut of the Asian market. U.S. elites “saw the Pacific as a vast source of economic enrichment and the Pacific coast of North America as a gateway to its riches.”⁵ As early as the 1780s, New England merchants were actively trading in Asian ports. Like the factory system in North America, U.S. businesspeople created the “American Factory” in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1801. Whaling ships from New England, like the fictional Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, were regularly cruising the northern Pacific Ocean and visiting the Hawaiian Islands by the 1830s.⁶

With U.S. merchants trading in ports worldwide long before today’s age of globalization, the Navy established fleet stations in key strategic locations across five continents shortly after the signing of the 1814 peace treaty with Britain.⁷ These were the “leasehold bases” the Navy created in places from Hong Kong to the San Francisco Bay to Rio de Janeiro to Spanish Menorca and beyond.⁸ In 1842 the Secretary of the Navy was calling for a major naval buildup and installations from Hawaiʻi to the west coasts of South and North America.9 By 1844 U.S. traders and military forces had access to five Chinese ports as a result of one of the many “unequal treaties” that European and U.S. governments would force on China. Sixty-four more ports would follow. These were, in effect, sovereign U.S. enclaves in China.

The most dramatic example of these Euro-American minicolonies was the “American Concession” in Shanghai. It merged with the British Concession to form the Shanghai International Settlement in 1863. It was what one writer has called “Chinatown reversed”: much like U.S. bases abroad today, it was “part of a city that was once home to thousands of Europeans and Americans, who could live there in their own slice of home in the middle of the Far East.” The Shanghai International Settlement remained foreign territory in China until the end of World War II; China regained sovereignty after Japanese forces occupied the settlement between 1941 and their defeat in 1945.¹⁰

Elsewhere in Asia, in 1853, Navy Commodore Matthew Perry paid fifty dollars for a plot of land on what’s now called Chi Chi Jima, near Iwo Jima in the western Pacific. He wanted the island to become a U.S. coaling station—necessary for new steamship travel and steam-powered military operations. Perry also created the first U.S. military base in the Kingdom of Okinawa, almost one hundred years before the island would be dotted with dozens of U.S. installations. Although it lasted for only a year, Perry used the base to help create U.S. enclaves in Japan and impose unequal treaties on both Okinawa and Japan, opening the latter to the United States and European powers for the first time. U.S. officials ensured similar extraterritorial powers in Borneo, Siam, Korea, and Tonga between 1850 and 1886.¹¹

An ocean away U.S. businesses and investors had opened up Cuban markets, and some wanted the United States to take the island from Spain. U.S. leaders had long looked jealously upon the strategic and economic value of the largest island in the Caribbean; many saw it as a “natural appendage of North America.”¹² In 1823 Thomas Jefferson called Cuba “the most interesting addition that could ever be made to our system of States.”¹³ Jefferson did not recommend trying to take Cuba, acknowledging that the United States could acquire the island only through war, which would antagonize Britain. By the 1840s and 1850s, presidential administrations tried to purchase the island from Spain or undermine its rule by backing private mercenaries and rebels seeking independence.14 When President James Polk seized around half of Mexico’s territory in 1848, he wanted more of Mexico, and Cuba too.

Map 11. U.S. Military Bases Overseas, 1776–1903.

Fleet stations, patrol and leasehold bases, and other installations beyond North America are shown. Some bases were occupied for only part of this period. For easy comparison of base maps over time, borders are contemporary. Oceans not to scale. Key sources: “Alaskan Command: ALCOM Facts,” Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, accessed March 1, 2020, www.jber.jb.mil/Units/Alaskan-Command/; “North American Forts, 1526–1956,” accessed June 13, 2019, www.northamericanforts.com; Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture.

Prior to the Civil War, as debates escalated over slavery and whether new states would be admitted to the Union as states allowing or prohibiting slavery, some southerners dreamed of building an empire in the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico based around enslaved labor and new slaveholding territories. Some led filibustering campaigns in the 1850s into Mexico and Central America, although all failed.¹⁵ (In the 1830s a small-scale invasion of Canada by a private U.S. “filibustering” force inspired some politicians and military officials to want to invade Canada again.)¹⁶

The most infamous of the filibusterers was William Walker, who led a private army, composed mostly of southerners, in an 1853 campaign into Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. He declared himself president of what he called the Republic of Sonora. After Mexicans forced him to retreat to California, Walker led at least six separate campaigns in Nicaragua between 1855 and 1860. For a brief period he declared himself president of Nicaragua, earned recognition from expansionist President Franklin Pierce, declared English the national language, legalized slavery, invaded Costa Rica, and announced his intention to take over all of Central America. Twice the U.S. Navy captured him and returned him to the United States; in 1859 the administration of President James Buchanan ordered him released. Walker soon landed in Honduras during another attempt to take over Nicaragua. This time Hondurans captured Walker, tried him, and executed him with a firing squad.¹⁷

While U.S. officials generally opposed private interventions like Walker’s, the U.S. military intervened in Latin America and the Caribbean throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. U.S. forces invaded or otherwise demonstrated their power in Nicaragua in 1853, 1854, 1857, 1867, 1894, 1896, 1898, and 1899; in Panama (then part of Colombia) in 1856, 1860, 1865, 1873, 1885, and 1895; and in Haiti in 1888 and 1891.¹⁸

After the Civil War U.S. officials increased the nation’s Pacific presence and naval power, thanks to shit—bird and bat shit, to be precise. The method of claiming new territories would provide a precedent for future colonization efforts. In the second half of the nineteenth century, “guano mania” hit U.S. farmers, after the first shipment of the rich fertilizer, consisting of bird and bat feces, arrived in the United States in 1844. Prices hit seventy-six dollars per pound by 1850.19

Private citizens and businesses went searching the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans for small, generally uninhabited islands full of the “white gold.” The U.S. government usually recognized their claims. The U.S. government claimed Palmyra, Jarvis, Baker, Howland’s, and Midway Islands to mine guano deposits and serve as naval coaling stations.²⁰ From 1859 to this day, the United States has claimed control over La Navase (Navassa Island), off the Haitian coast. African American workers from Baltimore mined guano there under “grotesque” slavery-like conditions into the late nineteenth century (some revolted and killed five white managers).²¹

In total, under the Guano Islands Act, the U.S. government recognized ninety-four guano islands as “appertaining” to the United States, with private individuals claiming yet more islands.²² What “appertaining” meant was another matter. No one really knew, the State Department later acknowledged. The ambiguity allowed the U.S. government to treat such islands as neither part of the United States nor foreign. This allowed the government to avoid the burdens of sovereignty while exercising the benefits of occupation. Beyond guano, small islands became useful for cable-relay stations and other communications, meteorological monitoring, and coaling and other small naval bases, as well as World War II landing strips.²³

As Christina Duffy Burnett points out, the race to collect islands “appertaining” to the United States is not just a funny historical oddity. U.S. officials learned from the European powers of the late nineteenth century (and later likely from the United States’ own colonial experience in the Philippines) the value of a more discreet, indirect form of imperialism avoiding sovereignty over dependent lands. European powers were finding “ways to take control over territory while avoiding many of the responsibilities that sovereignty implies”: Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and others created “protectorates” rather than colonies in Africa and Asia; the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Britain annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina and Cyprus, respectively, disguised as leases. The colonizers thus gained flexibility and freedom “while depriving people of their land (and more) by all manner of deception and subterfuge.” Soon the United States would do much the same with the imposed “lease” on Guantánamo Bay and de facto U.S. colonization of Cuba. Numerous other examples of “annexation without sovereignty” would follow in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.24

First, however, in 1867, the Stars and Stripes flag rose over a base sitting atop a much, much larger territory for the first time. Secretary of State William Seward had negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million. The flag raising and territorial transfer took place at Russia’s Baranof Castle, in Sitka. Before the arrival of the Russians, the place that’s now called Castle Hill was an indigenous Tlingit fort. The imperial succession and purchase involved the acquisition of territory larger than any in U.S. history except the Louisiana Purchase. The Alaska Territory, as it was soon known, was about twice the size of Texas. U.S. bases soon followed—including Forts Liscum, Davis, Saint Michael, Gibbon, Yukon, Egbert, Seward, and Wrangell and installations on Kodiak Island and the Kenai Peninsula. U.S. military power was suddenly on the northern edge of Asia.

Around the same time Seward and the military tried but mostly failed to create naval bases in the Caribbean.²⁵ Competition with Britain, France, and Germany was ramping up in anticipation of the construction of a Central American canal connecting the Atlantic and Pacific. Control over the Caribbean Sea would shape construction of any canal and future traffic through sea lanes connecting the oceans. With an eye to acquiring bases peacefully, Seward completed a treaty with Denmark to purchase its colony the Danish West Indies (today’s U.S. Virgin Islands), only for Congress to reject the pact. (The two countries signed another treaty in 1900. This time the Danish parliament rejected it. The sale of the colony finally went through during World War I.) U.S. officials also considered buying Danish Greenland and Iceland.²⁶

In 1869 Seward nearly negotiated the annexation of the Dominican Republic. This time the principal aim was the creation of a naval base in the large and strategically located Samaná Bay. Dominicans supported annexation in a referendum (although turnout was just 30 percent), and the country’s leaders signed an annexation treaty in 1870. It never went into effect after ratification efforts in the Senate failed, largely because of Euro-American senators’ concerns about incorporating a “mixed race” population into the United States and the effects of “the tropics” on the “Anglo-Saxon race.”a Similar sentiments led to Congress’s failure to pass an 1871 joint annexation resolution, as it had in annexing Texas. The two governments later signed a lease on the bay, but it was quickly canceled after a new Dominican government took power. In the absence of direct annexation, U.S. officials would rule the Dominican Republic after 1898 through a variety of barely disguised colonial devices, much as in Cuba and Haiti.²⁷

In Haiti, on the other side of the island of Hispaniola, where Cristóbal Colón first landed, U.S. leaders had designs on another location for a major Caribbean naval base and coaling station. Môle Saint-Nicholas was a large and protected port, and U.S. officials started to pressure Haiti’s government into giving the United States access, through both diplomatic threats and the deployment of gunboats to Port-au-Prince as a threat of invasion in 1889. Haitian officials refused and suffered the imposition of harsh tariffs as a result.²⁸ In the nineteenth century U.S. naval vessels invaded or otherwise violated Haitian waters at least fifteen times.²⁹ The pace of intervention only grew in the twentieth century.

By the 1870s U.S. public opinion clearly supported expansion beyond the continent, just as Euro-Americans had generally, if not universally, supported westward expansion. Across a variety of social, political, and economic sectors and classes, people increasingly viewed expansion into foreign markets as the solution to recurring economic crises in the latter half of the nineteenth century.³⁰

Foreign markets, naval power, and bases were the trinity of the man they called the “prophet.” Historian and president of the Naval War College Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan was read as “gospel” by everyone from future president Theodore Roosevelt to imperial Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II.31 Mahan derived his belief in foreign markets, naval power, and bases from his historical scholarship. His scholarly aim was to identify the factors in history that have allowed some empires to achieve global preeminence over others. Mahan’s interests weren’t purely academic. He spread his gospel in popular U.S. magazines such as the Atlantic and had access to some of the United States’ most powerful men. Mahan wanted to shape U.S. policy in the late nineteenth century and for the century to come.

In Mahan’s attempt to understand imperial history as a guide to U.S. policy, he focused on the struggle between imperial Britain and France in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. “If navies, as all agree, exist for the protection of commerce,” Mahan writes, “it inevitably follows that in war they must aim at depriving their enemy of that great resource, nor is it easy to conceive what broad military use they can subserve that at all compares with the protection and destruction of trade.”³² Applying these historical lessons to the United States, Mahan and his supporters argued for the maintenance of a navy at least equal to Britain’s that was able to operate globally. Mahan argued that great powers require strong navies capable of protecting a country’s commercial shipping and opening foreign markets to trade. And, to have a strong navy, a great power needs a far-flung network of support bases. “The maintenance of suitable naval stations,” Mahan wrote, “when combined with decided preponderance at sea, makes a scattered and extensive empire, like that of England, secure.”³³

Mahan was concerned when he compared the United States to the British Empire. Unlike the British Navy’s three hundred ships and thirty bases circling the globe, Mahan warned that, without “foreign establishments, either colonial or military,” U.S. warships “will be like land birds, unable to fly far from their own shores.”³⁴ In the era of coal-powered steamships, having access to coaling stations was critical to maintaining a navy capable of patrolling far from home (petroleum plays the same role today, except on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers). “Fuel is the life of modern naval war,” wrote Mahan. “It is the food of the ship; without it the modern monsters of the deep die of inaction.”³⁵

Mahan argued that the country had to acquire islands and other coastal locations in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico to create coaling stations and other naval bases. To justify a major naval buildup, he painted a scary picture of a country with huge undefended coastlines and aggressive European powers ready to seize bases and coaling stations in the Western Hemisphere. The military would first have to improve “fortifications and coast-defense ships” along the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts to give the Navy the security needed to patrol far from U.S. shores. Second, the country would have to prevent European powers from “acquir[ing] a coaling position within three thousand miles of San Francisco.” Third, and above all, the country would have to build up its “naval force, the arm of offensive power.”36 This meant a major shipbuilding campaign and the acquisition of new coaling stations and ports. Mahan’s argument for offensive power as the only adequate response to a world he portrayed as teeming with danger presaged aggressive post–World War II strategies of “forward deployment” and “containment,” which saw U.S. officials deploy bases and troops globally in a world they depicted as full of Soviet and communist threat.

The ultimate aim for Mahan and other military, political, and economic leaders, such as Roosevelt, Secretary of State Seward, and Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, was claiming islands or territory not for territory’s sake but for coaling and provisioning stations with a yet larger aim: they would be the literal way stations, as Mahan said, “along the way to the greater prize of foreign markets.” Here Mahan’s theories about naval power intersected with the popular view about the need for expansion into foreign markets to forestall stagnation and recurring economic recessions. “We must have new markets unless we would be visited by declines in wages and by great industrial disturbances,” said Lodge. Channeling Mahan, Lodge continued, “The old theory of competing in foreign markets merely by the price of the product is no longer practicable [and] a navy, coaling stations, and ports in the East . . . have become essential conditions in our time.”³⁷

Thanks in no small part to the lobbying of Mahan and his supporters, by the first decade of the twentieth century, the U.S. Navy was the world’s second largest—second only to the subject of Mahan’s study and admiration, Great Britain.³⁸ Although Mahan’s expansive proposals were never fully realized because of their expense, his influence led Navy officials to push for the creation of more coaling and repair stations, especially in the Pacific, to support U.S. business in Asia.39 An official U.S. Army history jealously captures the Navy’s growth in the period: “The historical writings of Alfred T. Mahan were particularly influential in establishing the framework of a global, blue-water fleet focused on the dominance of the Navy, the establishment of refueling bases, and the aggressive protection of commerce.”⁴⁰

By 1888 the United States had signed agreements to lease naval stations in the Kingdom of Samoa and in the Hawaiian Kingdom’s Pearl Harbor. Congress initially failed to provide the funds to build the bases. It meant only a temporary delay. In 1893 the government’s representative in Hawaiʻi and U.S. marines backed the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by Euro-American sugar planters and settlers. The government of President Grover Cleveland acknowledged the illegality of the “act of war” and called for restoring the monarchy. The coup plotters refused. They declared an independent state in 1894 and seized around 1.8 million acres of the kingdom’s lands.⁴¹ The son of a missionary family, Sanford B. Dole, assumed the role of president. His first cousin would soon come to the islands and establish the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. It’s now known as the Dole Food Company.

In 1898, just days after the explosion of the USS Maine and President William McKinley’s request for a declaration of war against Spain, McKinley asked Congress to annex Hawaiʻi. The islands of the previously independent kingdom offered a large coaling station and naval base halfway across the Pacific from which to deploy military power in support of U.S. businesses in Asia. They would also offer a base from which to control the Philippines. “We need Hawaii just as much [as] and a good deal more than we did California,” said McKinley. “It is manifest destiny.”⁴² Congress approved the annexation of Hawaiʻi in 1898, as well as the islands of the newly named American Samoa and tiny, uninhabited Wake Island in 1899. Naval bases and coaling and cable stations appeared almost immediately.⁴³ Coup supporter Sanford Dole became Hawaiʻi’s first territorial governor.

McKinley’s push to annex the Philippines was driven by its proximity to the economic markets of China. Lodge and others feared being cut out of profit-making opportunities by the European powers then busy dividing up China. They believed it critical “to establish ourselves with a large port and with territory in the East.”⁴⁴ Mahan acolyte Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt issued the orders to Adm. George Dewey to attack the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay with Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron, based in Hong Kong. Manila Bay was the Philippines’ key harbor and one of the most important in the region.45 Roosevelt sent the orders when his boss, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, was away at a doctor’s appointment. Long was shocked by the plans for transoceanic war but let the orders stand, probably for fear that newspapers would portray him as weak. The decision was “influenced in part by [Mahan’s] doctrine.”⁴⁶ On May 1, 1898, in a matter of hours, Dewey’s squadron sank the entire Spanish fleet protecting Manila.

By the middle of July, a little more than a month after the first U.S. marines landed in Guantánamo Bay (and one week after the annexation of Hawaiʻi), the Stars and Stripes was flying over Santiago de Cuba. The Cuba Libre flag was not. This was the flag of the multiracial group of Cuban revolutionaries who had been trying to overthrow Spanish rule for decades. When arranging the terms of the Spanish Empire’s surrender, U.S. officials ensured that Spain surrendered to the United States—not to the rebels. The aim of intervention for McKinley and his supporters had always been to install a government to the liking of U.S. officials to ensure U.S. political and economic dominance over the island. McKinley couldn’t directly annex and rule Cuba as he and the U.S. government had done with Alaska, Hawaiʻi, and other U.S.-claimed colonies. Anti-interventionist and anti-imperialist sentiments were powerful forces at the time. As part of Congress’s declaration of war against Spain, anti-imperialists and anti-annexationists had won a small victory by inserting an amendment renouncing any steps by the U.S. government “to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control” over Cuba.⁴⁷

Unable to ensure direct rule, President McKinley’s administration got the next best thing: U.S. officials offered Cuban leaders thinly disguised U.S. rule in exchange for Cuba’s official independence and the withdrawal of U.S. troops. McKinley would get direct colonial rule in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, and American Samoa. With U.S. troops still on the island, McKinley’s offer was one that Cuban representatives couldn’t refuse. In 1901 they begrudgingly allowed the U.S.-penned Platt Amendment to be inserted into the new Cuban Constitution. The amendment allowed the United States to invade Cuba at will to ensure stability and so-called Cuban independence. It prevented Cuba from freely making treaties with other governments and from acquiring debt. And it permitted the construction of U.S. “coaling or naval stations,” including on the forty-five-square miles of Guantánamo Bay, over which the United States would soon have “complete jurisdiction and control.”48 A political cartoon of the day portrayed a man representing Cuba tied to a post marked “Platt Amendment” and President McKinley using a hot iron to brand his back “US.”⁴⁹

Cubans had freed themselves from Spanish colonial rule only to find their island a colony again, with the trappings of sovereignty. The U.S.-appointed military governor Leonard Wood wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt, “There is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment.”⁵⁰ “None of us thought,” Cuban rebel Gen. Máximo Gómez said, “that [peace] would be followed by a military occupation by our allies, who treat us as a people incapable of acting for ourselves, and who have reduced us to obedience, to submission, and to a tutelage imposed by the force of circumstances.”⁵¹

Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge predicted the seizure of Cuba in the years leading up to 1898 and echoed Mahan in calling for a buildup of naval bases and a navy of such size to protect U.S. business interests on a global basis. “Commerce follows the flag,” he wrote famously. So it did with the Stars and Stripes flying high in Guantánamo Bay (and somewhat more subtly in the rest of Cuba). In the 1890s U.S. investors already had $50 million on the island. The United States was Cuba’s main trade partner.⁵² After the occupation of Guantánamo Bay, U.S. firms built up the economy of eastern Cuba, in particular, where economic output had been relatively small prior to 1898. U.S. sugar companies quickly dominated—much as they would dominate in Hawaiʻi and Central America. Between 1902 and 1929 sugar production in the east grew from 15 percent to nearly 70 percent of Cuba’s total production. United Fruit Company towns operated, as historian Jana Lipman explains, “largely outside Cuban law as quasi-independent enclaves within eastern Cuba.” The city of Guantánamo has long been overshadowed by the base. Within a few decades of U.S. occupation, the town’s elite consisted almost exclusively of U.S. expats involved in the sugar industry and locals who made money off the base.53

The hoisting of the U.S. rather than the Cuba Libre flag in Santiago de Cuba mirrored the scene thousands of miles away in the Philippines. After the U.S. Navy destroyed the Spanish naval fleet in Manila Bay, anti-Spanish Filipino rebels assumed U.S. forces would be their allies. They were mistaken. U.S. forces took over Manila and struck a deal with its Spanish defenders to orchestrate a surrender and prevent the revolutionary army from entering the city.⁵⁴

At the time there was debate in the United States about whether or not to seize all of the Philippines. There were more than seven thousand islands and a population of seven million, which was the equivalent of nearly 20 percent of the entire U.S. population. Some “imperial pragmatists” thought it best to establish only “a naval base and a coaling station.”⁵⁵ Others called for full annexation. Many invoked racist ideologies to support annexation of the Philippines and other Spanish colonies. They argued, for example, that the country had a duty to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Others emphasized the “enormous material benefits” that annexation would bring. There should be no hesitancy about seizing colonies, one senator argued: “We have had colonies in this country ever since we ceased to be colonies ourselves.”⁵⁶

Others opposed annexation. Calling themselves anti-imperialists, prominent figures such as Jane Addams argued that “forcible subjugation” of other peoples was tantamount to “open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our government.” The Democratic Party and its candidate for president in 1900, William Jennings Bryan, would campaign on a platform that “no nation can long endure half republic and half empire.”⁵⁷ Racism shaped the thinking of anti-imperialists as it did that of imperialists like Roosevelt. Drawing on popular ideas about race and social Darwinism (now debunked), many believed non-European populations to be inherently “inferior” to Euro-Americans, meaning they could not be governed or integrated into the country.⁵⁸

Other anti-imperialists, such as civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, argued that black people should oppose expansion abroad until the government could protect their rights at home. The African American newspaper the Washington Bee described the country as “busy on a hair-brained attempt to go into the colonizing business against its own Declaration of Independence.”59 Lodge acknowledged that if the anti-imperialists proved correct, “our whole past record of expansion is a crime.”⁶⁰

The McKinley administration sided with annexation, in part motivated by fears about German and Japanese interest in the other islands of the Philippines archipelago. In negotiations with the Spanish government, McKinley also claimed Guam and Puerto Rico, which would offer more locations for coaling stations, naval bases, and cable relay sites. “Being good pragmatists,” writes Thomas McCormick, U.S. officials declined the Spanish Crown’s offer to sell the rest of the Mariana Islands and the Caroline Islands.⁶¹ Spain sold them to Germany. On Guam the Navy designated a small Spanish military garrison and the entire island a U.S. naval station in 1899—technically Guam became one large military base. Admirals served as governors and generally ran Guam like a ship. Signs appeared reading, “English Only Will Be Spoken Here.”

In February 1899 the U.S. Congress passed a resolution explicitly prohibiting the people of the Philippines from U.S. citizenship. Another resolution that would have given the Philippines independence after the creation of a stable local government failed by a single vote.⁶² In a series of cases, the Supreme Court ruled that the people of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines were entitled to neither U.S. citizenship nor the full protection of the Constitution. They were to be considered “US nationals” living in, as Daniel Immerwahr puts it, “extra-constitutional zones.”⁶³ (The colonies remain extraconstitutional zones: People born in Puerto Rico got citizenship only when the military needed soldiers to fight in World War I; residents of Guam had to wait until after World War II. All the colonies have been denied statehood, the right to vote for president, and voting representation in Congress. Samoans remain “US nationals” who don’t get citizenship by birth.)

The McKinley administration and white Euro-American leaders saw the new colonies (a word not shunned at the time) through a racial lens. They believed Filipinos, Guam’s indigenous CHamoru people, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans were not “fit” for self-governance. (These attitudes remain today, as the islands’ political status alone reveals.) U.S. troops and diplomatic officials in the Philippines called the Filipinos “n****rs” and “gugus.” “Why those people are no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell,” one U.S. Army general in Cuba declared. Another said, “They are no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa.”64

In the Philippines rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo declared independence and established a government near Manila. With U.S. leaders unwilling to cede their new conquest, the United States had a new war on its hands. Fighting broke out between U.S. forces and Filipino rebels in early 1899. McKinley initially sent five thousand troops to occupy Manila in the summer of 1898. One year later there were almost forty thousand U.S. troops. Deployments eventually reached seventy thousand and generally averaged around forty-five thousand until 1913. The War Department deployed most of the troops to small garrisons or “stations.” In September 1899 there were 53 stations in the Philippines. The following September there were 413. By 1902 the number was 492.⁶⁵ U.S. forces also took over the Spanish fort at the port of Subic Bay. The military soon began expanding the naval station there. After World War II and Filipino independence, it would become the largest U.S. base outside the United States.

Aguinaldo’s insurgent army turned to guerilla warfare to uproot their new colonial occupiers. U.S. troops turned to the kind of ruthless, scorched-earth warfare honed horrifically against Native Americans. Hahn points to soldiers like Maj. Gen. Adna Chafee, who fought against the Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, and Cheyenne, before deploying to the Philippines. He “brought the Indian Wars with him to the Philippines and wanted to treat the recalcitrant Filipinos the way he had the Apaches in Arizona—by herding them onto reservations.” This would prove hard with a population of seven million, but U.S. troops imprisoned large numbers of Filipinos in concentration camps. Soon-to-be president Theodore Roosevelt saw similar parallels: “Every argument that can be made of the Filipinos could be made for the Apaches. . . . Every word that can be said of Aguinaldo could be said of Sitting Bull.”⁶⁶

Perhaps no soldier better embodies the continuity in racialized imperial domination from North America to the Philippines than Nelson A. Miles, one of the commanding generals of the U.S. Army during the occupation. After fighting in the Civil War, Miles spent most of the rest of the century fighting in the West against Kiowa, Comanche, Sioux, Nez Perce, and Apache. In 1894 Miles was in charge of putting down the railroad workers strike in Pullman, Illinois. He compared the strikers to Confederate and Indian enemies. This was another “war of civilization” against those who would bring “famine, pestilence, and death.” Miles asked for permission to open fire on the striking workers. At Wounded Knee Miles did not ask for permission. There at Pine Ridge, on December 29, 1890, he was the officer who gave the orders to Gen. George Custer’s former Seventh Cavalry to carry out the massacre of up to three hundred Lakota Sioux.67

Map 12. U.S. Bases, Wars, and Expansion Abroad, 1899–1940.

Significant bases, combat, and expansion outside U.S. states are shown. Some bases were occupied for only part of this period. Oceans not to scale. Additional bases existed during frequent invasions and occupations of Latin American countries in this period, including Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador. U.S. forces occupied Nicaragua in 1909–10 and 1912–1933. Key sources: “Fort Wiki,” accessed June 13, 2019, www.fortwiki.com; Robert E. Harkavy, Strategic Basing and the Great Powers, 1200–2000 (London: Routledge, 2007); “Alaskan Command: ALCOM Facts”; “North American Forts”; Pettyjohn, U.S. Global Defense Posture; Torreon and Plagakis, Instances of Use; U.S. Army Center of Military History, The Panama Canal: An Army’s Enterprise (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 2009).

In the Philippines, under the leadership of men like Miles, U.S. military forces fought a devastating counterinsurgency war. Torture, atrocities, and massacres were common. Under U.S. occupation and a war to crush the Philippines independence movement that formally lasted until 1902, hundreds of thousands of Filipino civilians died from direct violence in war, disease, and starvation. Tens of thousands of Filipino combatants and more than 4,200 U.S. soldiers died.⁶⁸ Fighting continued sporadically until 1913, likely taking thousands more lives. Most of the deaths occurred in the Muslim-majority southern islands of Mindanao. (The U.S. military would return to fight Muslim rebels on some of the same islands almost ninety years later.) U.S. forces “easily quelled” the Muslim resistance with “ ‘liberal use of ammunition,’ which achieved ‘very excellent results against the semi-savages,’ ” writes Patricio Abinales, noting the racism that shaped the war.⁶⁹ In one three-day “battle,” U.S. troops led by former Cuban Rough Rider major general Leonard Wood killed at least six hundred Moro Muslims, including hundreds of women and children. Twenty U.S. men reportedly died.⁷⁰ Some U.S. news media and critics, including the likes of Mark Twain and his Anti-Imperialist League, expressed horror about the “slaughter,” as some had after Wounded Knee.⁷¹ Criticisms “were quickly shunted aside by the politics of the imperial age,” writes historian Joshua Gedacht.⁷²

Massacres by U.S. forces were a recurring feature of U.S. warfare. From Wounded Knee to the Philippines, Gedacht writes, “the US Army’s colonial campaigns produced recurring yet distinct incidents of extreme bloodshed.” During the period from 1890 to the 1920s, when the United States was joining the most powerful militaries and empires in the world, “nearly half of all officers who rose to command the US Army had been implicated in colonial massacres.” The massacres “had at least one thing in common”: the killing of generally non-Christian, nonwhite colonized peoples.⁷³

One of the imperialists, Albert Bushnell Hart, explained in Harper’s Magazine in 1899 that the annexations of 1898 were “not signs of a new policy, but the enlargement of a policy long pursued.” The United States, he wrote, “for more than a hundred years has been a great colonial power” in its rule over American Indians. “Whatever is done in the future,” he predicted accurately, “will be based on the habits of the past.”74

Before his retirement Lt. Gen. Nelson Miles returned to the Presidio of San Francisco in 1902 as commanding general of the U.S. Army. The Presidio remained the main deployment and return point for U.S. forces in the Philippines. One of Miles’s successors at the Presidio would soon marshal ten thousand soldiers to invade Mexico once more, in search of Pancho Villa, who had been conducting raids along the U.S. border. But first, troops would deploy from the Presidio to help crush a rebellion in China in a bid to open Chinese markets to U.S. businesses.

U.S. bases and troops could now be found from the Caribbean to the Pacific and beyond. The country’s bases mirrored the rapid expansion of the country’s borders and its leaders’ aspirations for further economic, political, and military power. In this classic period of European imperialism, when Europe’s empires were competing for colonies in Africa and Asia, the U.S. government claimed the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico from Spain and annexed Hawaiʻi, American Samoa, and Wake Island. The United States had a collection of new colonies and a de facto colony in Cuba, moving the country into the company of the world’s largest and most powerful empires.⁷⁵