7

THE MILITARY OPENS DOORS

When I visited Guam in 2012, I met a man who introduced himself as the “Prime Minister of the Sinåhi Archipelago.” At the time I knew that many in Guam refer to the island by its indigenous CHamoru name, Guåhan, but I was unfamiliar with the name Sinåhi Archipelago.a (I later learned that a sinåhi is a type of clamshell necklace once worn by the CHamorus’ ancestors. Activists in the twentieth century brought back the tradition.) The CHamoru prime minister told me that he had declared his independence from the United States and was Sinåhi’s only citizen: “I was never a U.S. citizen. I’m a citizen of the Sinåhi Republic.”

The ancestors of today’s CHamorus arrived on Guåhan as the island’s first human inhabitants between 1500 and 2000 BCE. For the past nearly five hundred years, CHamorus have not enjoyed full political independence. Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1521 and claimed Guåhan/Guam as a Spanish possession three decades later. Like the indigenous peoples of the Americas, CHamorus were decimated by disease and violence.¹ Spain ruled Guam as a colony until U.S. and Spanish negotiators agreed to include the island in the settlement that ended the 1898 war.

The war with Spain initially seemed to many in the United States to be a “splendid little war.” Rapidly defeating Spain and capturing its colonies had catapulted the United States into direct competition with the most powerful empires of Europe. Soon, however, the many challenges of colonial conquest in Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines became apparent to U.S. leaders. In the Philippines the war quickly transformed into a deadly and costly counterinsurgency conflict. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops would deploy for years on end to this new, little-known colony, with its roughly seven thousand islands and seven million people, thousands of miles from North America. The war in the Philippines continued until 1913. Thousands of U.S. troops came home wounded or in coffins, and the war soon grew unpopular in the United States (much as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq grew increasingly unpopular in the past two decades).

Confronting the challenges of colonial rule, including both violent and peaceful opposition in the new colonies and protest from a powerful anti-imperialist movement at home, U.S. leaders developed new ways to exert power and control. The strategies U.S. government officials developed in the first years of the twentieth century became a template for imperial strategies still practiced today. Following the conquests of 1898, U.S. leaders began to pursue a new kind of imperialism. This was an imperialism that generally avoided formal colonization and the bald-faced seizure of territory. This was an imperialism characterized in part by informal assertions of dominance exemplified by “Open Door” policies in China.2

While the Open Door became an important template for the extension of U.S. power abroad, the period between 1899 and World War II also featured frequent, largely underestimated demonstrations of force, military interventions, and the long-term basing of forces abroad.³ It was U.S. military intervention in China in 1901 that put U.S. leaders in a position to propose the strategies of the Open Door. In the years that followed, Latin American countries were by far the most frequent targets of intervention. In Central America and most of the Caribbean in particular, the United States would not create more colonies but instead impose a kind of de facto colonization without the burdens of sovereignty and the growing international and domestic criticism accompanying colonial rule.

With the conquest of the Philippines, U.S. power was situated firmly in Asia. U.S. businesses and political leaders had long been “mesmerized” by China, given the enormous size of its population—that is, the size of its potential consumer market—and the success of early U.S. exports there, such as tobacco, textiles, and kerosene.4 The lucrative Chinese opium trade likewise made fortunes for merchants such as Boston elites Warren Delano (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather) and members of the Forbes family, among others. At the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. officials faced the challenge of competing in China when other powers were far better positioned to dominate business opportunities. Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan had already carved up the Chinese coast, creating de facto colonial enclaves complete with exclusive rights to trade, mining, banking, and railroads. U.S. citizens had enjoyed the privileges of enclaves like the Shanghai International Settlement, but the United States clearly lagged behind its European and Asian competitors in economic, political, and military power and influence in China.

Building up the U.S. military presence in the region was a first step. In the Philippines this meant as many as seventy thousand troops and a growing naval base at Subic Bay. Around 1900 China’s rebellion of “Boxers” (a rough translation of the movement of Yihequan, the Righteous and Harmonious Fists) broke out against colonial occupation. This threatened U.S. and other foreign businesses, and the McKinley administration responded by deploying five thousand troops to China from the Philippines and the Presidio in San Francisco. Tens of thousands of additional troops in the Philippines remained at the ready for further deployment given the sporadic fighting in the archipelago.

While U.S. troops helped put down the rebellion with other foreign forces, U.S. leaders knew they lacked the military strength to control China or any significant part of it unilaterally. The distance from the West Coast, the size of China’s territory and population, and the advantages enjoyed by the European powers and Japan were too much to overcome. Plus there was the danger of a larger military buildup arousing more Chinese nationalism or triggering clashes between the colonial powers. U.S. leaders wanted another solution to ensure U.S. businesses had access to Chinese markets and prevent the Europeans and Japanese from dividing China among themselves. The solution was the economic policy known as the Open Door. This was “an updated version of Britain’s old Open Door policy for China,” explains Thomas McCormick. But rather than carving up China into enclaves and spheres of influence, U.S. officials proposed a kind of collaborative strategy of economic imperialism in which foreign powers would compete on an even playing field while cooperatively funneling investment into the country.5

The U.S. version of the Open Door never came to fruition in China. Nonetheless, it became a model for using Open Door–style economic and political tools to exert imperial influence over other nations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the background, undergirding the political-economic strategies, military power was always lurking. In 1903, after the Boxer movement was no longer a threat, the Navy created a South China Patrol at bases in the British colony of Hong Kong and in Canton (Guangzhou). It also created Yangtze Patrol and a Marine patrol at a garrison in the British-U.S. International Settlement in Shanghai and later at Hankow.⁶ The Army sent most of its soldiers back to the Philippines but left a small regiment in Peking (Beijing). In 1912 the Army created a garrison in Tientsin (Tianjin) along the railroad running to Peking. A regiment of around one thousand soldiers remained there for twenty-six years.

U.S. officials abandoned any plans for a larger military presence in the western Pacific after imperial Japan demonstrated the power of its navy in defeating the Russian Empire in their 1905 war. Military leaders concluded that U.S. bases and warships were too vulnerable so far from the United States to justify greater investment. On the other hand, Theodore Roosevelt secured funding in 1907 to build a fortified naval hub in the middle of the Pacific, at Hawaiʻi’s Pearl Harbor. A year later Roosevelt started a major naval buildup to create the “most powerfully armed and longest-range battleships afloat.” He would send his “Great White Fleet” of sixteen battleships on a round-the-world voyage to demonstrate U.S. military and economic power.⁷

Presidents William McKinley and Roosevelt showed similar military restraint and imperial guile in Latin America. In Central America there was long-standing interest among U.S. elites to build a canal to speed trade between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. U.S. leaders were unhappy when Colombia’s government rejected a U.S.-proposed treaty to build the canal across Panama, which was then a province of Colombia. In retaliation U.S. officials and Navy warships helped Panamanian secessionists declare independence in 1903. In the same year that U.S. officials secured permanent access to Guantánamo Bay by another kind of “unequal treaty,” the U.S. government also pressured the Panamanian government into signing a canal treaty. If the Panamanian legislature failed to ratify the treaty, U.S. officials threatened to withdraw U.S. Navy warships protecting the new country from the Colombian Navy.

The treaty gave the United States de facto sovereign rights in perpetuity to 553 square miles that became the Panama Canal Zone. The cost was $10 million and yearly rent of $250,000.8 The treaty authorized extensive powers including those of land expropriation outside the Canal Zone and the authority to build bases. As in Cuba, Panama’s Constitution allowed the United States to intervene militarily “in any part of the republic of Panama to reestablish public peace and constitutional order in the event of their being disturbed.”⁹ The country eventually hosted more than one hundred bases.¹⁰ Between 1856 and the 1989 U.S. war in Panama, the U.S. military invaded the country twenty four times.¹¹ The Canal Zone bases also served as launchpads for invasions elsewhere in Latin America. Panama, like Cuba, was a U.S. “colony in all but name.”¹² The Canal Zone, like Guantánamo Bay, was a colony, full stop.^b

A year after signing the canal treaty, President Roosevelt announced his “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The new doctrine was really a threat. The United States, he declared, had the right to intervene in any of the nations of Latin America if their indebtedness threatened European intervention, if they committed “chronic wrongdoing,” or if they displayed “impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society.” Using the gendered language for which he became famous, Roosevelt had effectively declared the countries of Latin America protectorates of the United States, whose independence and ability to prevent U.S. intervention depended on abiding by rules set by U.S. leaders.13 “Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship . . . [and] need fear no interference from the United States,” the president said with faux, patronizing generosity.¹⁴

Under Roosevelt and subsequent presidential administrations, other countries in the hemisphere had every reason to fear U.S. interference. Roosevelt euphemistically called such unilateral action “international police power.”¹⁵ Cuba would soon see the return of U.S. troops and an occupation by the Army of Cuban Pacification for almost three years, from 1906 to 1909. U.S. troops occupied the country again in 1912 and for five years from 1917 to 1922. The U.S. military occupied the Dominican Republic in 1903, 1904, 1914, and for eight years, from 1916 to 1924. Neighboring Haiti suffered occupation in 1914 and for nearly twenty years from 1915 to 1934.

In Central America, where U.S. businesses had been dominant since the late nineteenth century, Honduras experienced eight invasions and occupations, in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1920, 1924, and 1925. The U.S. military occupied Nicaragua for two years in 1909–10 and for around two decades from 1912 to 1933. Elsewhere U.S. troops invaded Guatemala in 1920, Costa Rica in 1921, and El Salvador in 1932.¹⁶ The military occupations depended on the establishment or use of local military bases, camps, and garrisons to station U.S. troops. In Nicaragua, for example, between 1930 and 1932, there were at least eight U.S. garrisons.¹⁷ This was in addition to the U.S. warships that entered Latin American ports some six thousand times between the mid-nineteenth century and 1930, in classic gunboat diplomacy style.¹⁸

Frequent military invasions coupled with profound economic and political influence meant that U.S. imperial control was more pervasive in Central America and the Caribbean than anywhere else in the world. “Yet apart from the Panama Canal Zone [and Guantánamo Bay],” Victor Bulmer-Thomas points out, control “did not depend on colonies. Control was exercised through protectorates in Nicaragua and Panama and client states elsewhere,” including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. In 1920, Bulmer-Thomas notes, Franklin Roosevelt “boast[ed] that the United States controlled the votes of all six Central American countries in the proposed League of Nations.”19

Mexico was similarly the “perfect embodiment” of informal, Open Door imperialism, at least until its revolution in 1910. After losing nearly half of its territory in the war with the United States, Mexico had been an Open Door to U.S. economic and political influence. Since 1876 especially, Mexico was as much of an economic dependency of its northern neighbor as it had been to its Spanish colonizer: mines were controlled by U.S. firms; railroads were designed to ship the wealth of the mines from south to north; the oil industry was dominated by John Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, and other oil giants; the peso was pegged to the dollar; and Mexico was deeply indebted to U.S. banks by the turn of the twentieth century.²⁰ The instability and weakness generated by the economic and political control emanating from the north helped trigger the Mexican Revolution. In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson became embroiled in the revolution and sent U.S. troops to occupy Vera Cruz. Two years later a “punitive expedition” deployed from the Presidio to invade Mexico again; the troops spent half a year searching unsuccessfully in northern Mexico for the revolutionary leader Pancho Villa.²¹

Even after the revolution’s end, Mexico struggled to assert its control over its natural resources and economy in the face of U.S. corporate power. Open Door imperialism has remained a “recurring reality” for Mexico as a result of indebtedness to U.S. banks, the role of Mexicans as a cheap reserve labor supply for U.S. businesses, low-wage maquiladoras, the North American Free Trade Agreement, tensions over immigration and the border, and U.S. drug war policy, among other political, economic, and military dynamics over the past century.²²

The Marine Corps played a significant role in many of the invasions of Mexico and other parts of Latin America. One of the most decorated officers in Marine Corps history later regretted his role in the wars and the ends they served. “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers,” wrote the oft-quoted two-time Medal of Honor winner Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler. “In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.

Butler reflected, “Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”23

Each of the invasions and occupations led by men like Butler couldn’t have happened without bases to launch, support, and maintain military operations. In classic imperial style these bases, and the wars and military interventions that bases enabled, usually helped stabilize conditions to protect U.S. corporate investments and to open up new markets and profit-making opportunities abroad. “The search for markets, and for access to natural resources, is as central to American history as it has been to the history of every great power in every age,” writes Stephen Kinzer.²⁴ Bases, troops, and war helped ensure smooth operations for U.S. businesses and capitalism more broadly. Forts in the western territories claimed by the United States did much the same a century prior, but they did so generally on a smaller scale: the U.S. Army made land available and (relatively) safe for settlement and Euro-Americans’ individual and familial enrichment. So too the Army protected major trading posts, trade routes, railroads, and eventually growing cities to support Euro-American profit making and ensure the smooth operation of capitalism in North America.

Honduras helps illustrate the new imperial pattern: as Butler says, he “helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.”²⁵ Following this and seven more U.S. invasions and occupations between 1907 and 1925, a group of increasingly powerful “banana men” and U.S. banana companies basically took over the country.26 By 1913 two-thirds of Honduran exports were in the hands of one of the most powerful banana men, Samuel Zemurray, and his closest rivals, the Vacarro brothers from New Orleans (their Standard Fruit Company later merged with Dole, one of the Euro-American settler companies that dominated Hawaiʻi). The banana companies “bought up lands, built railroads, established their own banking systems, and bribed government officials at a dizzying pace,” writes historian Walter LaFeber. “If Honduras was dependent on the fruit companies before 1912, it was virtually indistinguishable after 1912. . . . In 1914, the leading banana firms held nearly a million acres of the most fertile land. Their holdings grew during the 1920s until the Honduran peasants had no hope of access to their nation’s good soil. In 1918, dollars became legal tender in Honduras.” The wealth of the country and its yellow gold were being “carried off to New Orleans, New York, and later Boston.” Hondurans were left with low-wage jobs in the banana groves and export duties, which were mostly pocketed by a small group of Honduran elites, when they weren’t evaded entirely (in an economic structure that remains largely intact today).²⁷

Honduras became, as LaFeber says, “the original ‘banana republic,’ ” under the near-complete domination of the U.S. banana companies and their political and military muscle, the U.S. government.²⁸ In popular usage banana republic calls to mind (clothing company aside) buffoon-like “third world” despots in the mold of Woody Allen’s film Bananas. Many forget the term’s original meaning. Writer O. Henry coined the term after living in Honduras. He used it to refer to weak, marginally independent countries facing overwhelming foreign economic and political domination. In other words, a banana republic is a de facto colony—which is what Honduras and some other countries in Latin America had become. In an irony that would likely anger him profoundly, Butler’s name now adorns a Marine Corps base in Okinawa, Japan: the island has been a de jure and de facto colony of both Japan and the United States for most of the past 150 years.

U.S. imperialism after 1898 became less dependent on the creation of new formal colonies and more dependent on informal, less overtly violent—but violent nonetheless—political and economic tools backed by military might, including bases abroad. “In this mode” of imperialism, writes McCormick, “the major means of control are largely economic and the chief actors are not the state but private American traders and investors, albeit backed by government influences and military power if need be.”29 As revisionist historians and others have emphasized, this was the new kind of Open Door imperialism. But it was an Open Door framed and undergirded by frequent military invasions, lengthy military occupations, gunboat diplomacy, and permanent bases from Cuba, Panama, and Puerto Rico to Alaska, Hawaiʻi, and the Philippines to Guam, Samoa, and China.

Missionaries again played an important role in this new U.S. imperialism: in the thirty years between 1890 and 1920, the number of U.S. missionaries abroad jumped from nine hundred to more than fourteen thousand. As with other imperial powers, many in the United States had a growing sense of the nation pursuing a global humanitarian mission.³⁰ So too, many U.S. Americans embraced a belief in spreading democratic ideals. Both missions had powerful racial (and racist) content. Ideas of white supremacy and the “white man’s burden” to civilize “lesser,” nonwhite, non–Anglo-Saxon Protestant peoples infused much of the missionary idealism of U.S. leaders and millions of other citizens. “The day is not far distant when,” President William Taft declared, “the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority as a race, it already is ours morally.”³¹

This intertwined sense of racial, religio-spiritual, and national superiority has its roots at least as deep as the first Puritan settlers in New England. As Richard Mather and John Cotton articulated, Puritans believed they were fulfilling God’s prophecy as God’s chosen people, special and superior to all others.³² In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an even more expansive vision of racial, religious, and national superiority became embodied by the language of “manifest destiny” and the idea that the United States was divinely predestined to conquer and rule others.

Ideas about a distinct “American” mission shaped political discourse and decisions about expansion and intervention, alongside economic, political, and military motivations.³³ So too, the desire of leaders, such as Theodore Roosevelt, to demonstrate their manhood through the use of military force played a role in shaping a hyperinterventionist U.S. imperialism. As for other imperial powers, the sense of mission—in the U.S. case, based around assumptions of white, Christian, U.S. American, and male supremacy—was helpful in rationalizing violence, intervention, and war. “Ottoman, Russian, and Chinese empires, like the French, Dutch, and US,” Ann Stoler and David Bond explain, “have all insisted at different moments that their raison d’être was different, that their violences were temporary, and that their humanitarian visions excused or distinguished their interventions as ad hoc measures, not sustained excesses.”34

In the early twentieth century, periods of intervention, occupation, and base creation in new lands were lengthy at times but eventually came to an end. Occupation in Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic lasted for many years or even decades, but, with the exception of Guantánamo Bay, the military packed up and left them for home at the end of each occupation period. The same was true after World War I in Europe. During the war hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops deployed to the continent and helped change the course of a war that killed tens of millions. After the war ended approximately fifteen thousand U.S. soldiers occupied parts of Germany between Luxembourg and the Rhine River; troops from Belgium, France, and Great Britain occupied other parts of Germany. For four months U.S. troops briefly occupied Austria. By early 1923 the entire occupation force had returned home.³⁵

Less often remembered was the occupation of Russia. Toward the end of World War I, Wilson and the War Department deployed around fifteen thousand U.S. forces to both western and eastern Russia as part of a multinational invasion attempting, unsuccessfully, to support anti-Bolshevik forces during the Russian Revolution. With U.S. leaders also hoping to check growing Japanese power in East Asia, U.S. troops occupied Vladivostok from August 1918 until April 1920. They returned home when it became clear the Bolsheviks were firmly in control of the soon renamed Soviet Union.³⁶

The only occupying troops that did not return home were in the Danish Virgin Islands. U.S. administrations had tried to buy the Dutch-colonized islands since the mid-nineteenth century. The Wilson administration finally purchased the soon renamed colony, the U.S. Virgin Islands, for $25 million during the war. U.S. officials had worried Germany would overrun Denmark and create a base of its own in the Caribbean.37

During the Great Depression and the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, U.S. policy toward Latin America shifted, with a move away from the long series of U.S. invasions. Under Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy, U.S. political and economic power and influence persisted in the hemisphere. With the onset of World War II and the “Cold War” that followed, the cessation of invasions and occupations would prove to be merely a pause.

Cuba was one country that faced renewed intervention after the war, of various kinds: military and political, economic and ideological. In 1934, however, the Cuban government would finally win the annulment of the Platt Amendment, which had cemented its colony-like status. Still, U.S. officials insisted on a new treaty to hold on to Guantánamo Bay. It contained the stipulation that Cuba could never force the United States to leave. Before World War II the military briefly considered giving Guantánamo Bay back to Cuba. A group of U.S. foreign policy experts pointed out that there were enough bases on the U.S. Gulf Coast and in Puerto Rico to ensure U.S security. They recommended the government “seriously consider whether the retention of Guantánamo will not cost more in political misunderstanding than it is worth in military strategy.”³⁸

The Roosevelt administration decided to hold on to Guantánamo, as it did Guam and the other colonies hosting military installations. By the end of the 1930s, before the start of World War II, the United States had a consolidated collection of bases across North America and a sizable but still comparably small collection of extraterritorial bases in the colonies. Most U.S. leaders called the colonies territories by this point, given growing global opposition to colonialism, but they were still colonies, without democratic incorporation into the United States. In addition to Guam and Guantánamo, they included Hawaiʻi, Alaska, the Philippines, Panama, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Wake Island, Midway Island, and Johnston Atoll (among other “guano islands”).

During World War II, Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, and some of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands would be the only parts of the United States occupied by a foreign power, Japan. The skin color and limited rights of the colonies’ inhabitants explain why these periods of brutal occupation are largely unknown in the rest of the United States. Few know that far more Filipinos died than any other U.S. nationals during the war: 1,111,938 Filipinos, compared to 407,316 U.S. military personnel. Many Filipinos were slaughtered by Japanese forces. Many died during a U.S. campaign to take back the Philippines that shelled and bombed Manila and other parts of the archipelago into rubble. The military’s near-complete disregard for civilian casualties would have been unthinkable if Japanese forces had occupied one of the forty-eight states.39

By the end of World War II, after the defeat of Japan, the Philippines, Guam, and many of the other colonies would become major hubs in a globe-spanning network of foreign bases that rapidly became the largest in world history. While prewar U.S. leaders developed new economic and political tools of Open Door imperialism—backed as they were by military bases, invasions, and other demonstrations of force—bases would become foundational to the U.S. Empire in the post–World War II era.