5
EMPIRE STATE OF MIND
It had all happened very fast for William McKinley. Imperial affairs were far outside his ken. Speaking of the Philippines, he supposedly confided to a friend that before the war with Spain, he “could not have told where those darned islands were within two thousand miles.”
The geography section, moreover, was the easiest part of the exam. The real head-scratcher was the final essay question, worth most of the grade: Having seized Spain’s empire, what should the United States do with it? Explain your answer with reference to economics, geostrategy, and the prevailing racial ideologies of the late nineteenth century.
The question was particularly vexing with respect to the distant and populous Philippine Islands. They were near China, and thus potential stepping-stones in a trade empire of the sort that Alfred Thayer Mahan had proposed. Yet the United States had no existing business in the Philippines—by one count, there were fewer than ten U.S. citizens there when the war broke out. Commodore Dewey doubted that Washington would take more than a coaling station.
But that was before Dewey dispatched the Spanish fleet to the bottom of Manila Bay, before Teddy Roosevelt crested San Juan Heights. The collapse of Spain’s beleaguered empire placed the whole Philippine archipelago in McKinley’s surprised hands. What to do? Return the islands to Spain? Sell them? Leave them be? “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight,” McKinley explained to an audience of churchmen, “and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night.”
To McKinley, none of the choices was particularly appetizing. Returning the colony to Spain would be “cowardly,” handing it over to anyone else would be “bad business.” He doubted that Filipinos could govern themselves. He thus saw only one option: take the Philippines, “educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could for them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”
Resolute, he sent for the War Department’s cartographer. “I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States,” he remembered, pointing to the map in question, “and there they are.”
Indeed, there they were. The war with Spain gave rise to the only moment in U.S. history when cartographers aggressively rejected the logo map. In its place they offered maps of the empire. Publishers, cashing in on empire fever, rushed to put out atlases showcasing the country’s new dimensions.
“It does look a little bit odd to see Porto Rico, Hawaii, and the distant Philippine islands on the United States map,” reflected one writer. “But there they are and printed as carefully and described as carefully as if they had been for a whole generation in their present honored company.”
By 1900, such maps were common. They appeared as a matter of course in atlases, on classroom walls, in textbooks, and at the front of the census report. Some showed the North American mainland surrounded by insets. Others showed the United States stretching out over the world map, from the Caribbean to the edge of China. Either way, the message was clear: the country had undergone a metamorphosis. The caterpillar had unfurled its butterfly wings.
Writers, too, sensed the change and searched for a new name for the transformed country. They offered suggestions in the titles of books: Imperial America (1898), The Greater Republic (1899), The Greater United States (1904), and seven books published in the decade after 1898 whose titles involved the phrase Greater America.
The Greater United States: Maps like this, taken from the inside cover of a 1900 history textbook, appeared frequently starting in 1899, often as the principal maps of the United States. Shown, along with the states, are a much-diminished Indian Country, as well as Hawai‘i, Guam, Wake, American Samoa, the Philippines, Alaska, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.
“The term ‘United States of America’ has ceased to be an accurate description of the countries over which the Stars and Stripes float,” the author of one argued. “Like ‘United Kingdom,’ it applies merely to the central and dominating body, the seat of empire; and Greater America comprises almost as wide a range of governments as Greater Britain itself.”
The term “United States of America” has ceased to be an accurate description. It was a remarkable observation. And it gave rise not only to a transient bout of verbal creativity but to a much more enduring nomenclatural shift.
Although the country’s official name has always been the United States of America, in the nineteenth century it was common to call it the United States, or perhaps refer to it by its political structure: the Republic or the Union. Though inhabitants of the country were often called Americans, it is striking how infrequently America was used. Walt Whitman was fond of the term, as in “I Hear America Singing” (1860) or the Young America movement of which he was a member (Herman Melville, another member, also used America at times). But one can search through all the messages and public papers of the presidents—including annual messages, inaugural addresses, proclamations, special messages to Congress, and much more—from the founding to 1898 and encounter only eleven unambiguous references to the country as America, about one per decade.
Nor was the word America included in the patriotic songs that got sung before 1898. You won’t find it in the lyrics to “Yankee Doodle,” “Hail to the Chief,” “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “Dixie,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” or “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” It isn’t even in “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the 1814 composition later adopted as the national anthem. The word that does appear in nineteenth-century lyrics is Columbia, as in the District of Columbia, an earlier literary name for the country. Though they have fallen from favor today, “Columbia,” “Hail, Columbia,” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” were among the most sung anthems of the nineteenth century.
Somewhere around the turn of the century, though, all that changed. One sharp-eared British writer heard the switch. “For some thirty years prior to 1898, while the adjective ‘American’ has been in general use, the noun ‘America’ has been extremely rare,” he wrote. “One might, up to that annus mirabilis, have travelled five thousand miles and read a hundred books and newspapers without ever having once come across it; ‘United States’ being almost invariably the term employed by the American for his own country.” After 1898, though, he noted that “the best speakers and writers,” feeling that the United States no longer captured the nature of their country, switched to America.
If the “best speakers and writers” could be stretched to include presidents, that was true. Though McKinley, like most of his predecessors, declined to use America in his public addresses, the reluctance ended there. His successor, Theodore Roosevelt, spoke of America in his first annual message and never looked back. In one two-week period, Roosevelt used the name more than all his predecessors combined had. Every president since has used America freely and frequently.
The anthems changed, too: no longer “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” but “America the Beautiful” and “God Bless America.”
Eighteen ninety-eight was a momentous break from the past, requiring new maps and names. But, one might ask, why? Hadn’t the country contained both states and territories from the start? Hadn’t the borders been in motion since the Louisiana Purchase? Why were new names needed only now?
It’s true that the United States had been annexing territory for nearly a century. But there was something different about the post-1898 acquisitions. It wasn’t the land. It was the people who lived on it.
Looking back on the years before 1898, one sees a pattern. Though the United States had rapidly annexed new territory, it had rarely incorporated large nonwhite populations. Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, Texas, and the Mexican cessions—these added a lot of area to the country but only relatively small “foreign” populations (Native Americans mainly, but also Mexicans, Spaniards, French, and, in the case of Louisiana, free blacks).
Before 1898, the largest population bump from annexation came from the lands wrested from Mexico (including Texas) between 1845 and 1853. Yet, as bumps go, it wasn’t much. While those accessions enlarged the country’s area by 69 percent, the accompanying Indians and Mexicans increased its population by less than 1.5 percent over eight years. In the demographically explosive United States, where the population was already growing at more than 3 percent a year, that small influx was easily diluted: a sprinkler in a rainstorm.
This was no accident. The Mexican War of 1846–48 had ended with U.S. forces occupying Mexico City. Some in Congress proposed taking all of Mexico. From a military perspective, that was entirely feasible. But South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, one of the nation’s prime defenders of slavery, objected. “We have never dreamt of incorporating into the Union any but the Caucasian race—the free white race,” he insisted on the Senate floor. “Are we to associate with ourselves, as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed races of Mexico?”
Apparently not. The United States annexed the thinly populated northern part of Mexico (including present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) but let the populous southern part go. This carefully drawn border gave the United States, as one newspaper put it, “all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people.”
A few wished to go farther. Some proslavery advocates, worried that the booming white settler population might crowd out slavery, sought room for their way of life farther south. They staged a series of “filibusters,” private invasions of Latin American republics that, they hoped, would lead to annexations. The most dramatic was William Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua in 1855, which improbably propelled Walker briefly to the Nicaraguan presidency.
But Walker was disappointed (and, in 1860, executed). Washington didn’t back him, nor did it support the other filibusters. The problem wasn’t that men like Walker wanted to expand slavery. The problem was that they wanted to do so by bringing more Latin Americans into the union.
Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and this is what you got: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that fed on land but avoided incorporating people. Uninhabited guano islands—those were fine. But all of Mexico or Nicaragua? No.
In the late 1860s the president of the Dominican Republic signaled that he would welcome the U.S. purchase of his country. President Ulysses S. Grant was eager for the deal—the Dominican Republic was, after all, prime sugar and coffee real estate. Yet even with a rich country served up on a plate, even at the urging of a popular war-hero president whose party controlled Congress, legislators wouldn’t swallow the bait. The Dominican Republic was “situated in tropical waters, and occupied by another race, of another color,” explained the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, and “never can become a permanent possession of the United States.”
Alaska, which Andrew Johnson’s administration sought to purchase from Russia in 1867, encountered the same resistance. “We do not want … Exquimaux fellow citizens,” griped The Nation. The deal went through only because, in the end, there weren’t that many “Exquimaux,” and there was quite a lot of Alaska.
Exactly how many Alaska Natives there were is hard to say. The U.S. census did not count them. This was the flip side to the careful annexations, another way to control who was part of the country and who wasn’t. From the start, the census had declined to count most indigenous people. Thus, for more than a century, a government that had reliable decennial tallies of its toymakers and chimney sweeps, of its cows and its horses, could not say how many Indians lived within its borders.
When the census did begin to count Alaska Natives, in 1880, and mainland Indians, in 1890, it separated them from the rest of the population lest they contaminate statistics about “the United States.” This was the start of the segregated census, the practice of taking some of the enumerated inhabitants to be part of the country and consigning others to a sort of statistical purgatory. In the 1890 census report, you have to turn to page 963 and look in the middle of a paragraph to learn—reported as minor trivia—that the full population of the country, including Natives, was 62,979,766.
Excluding Natives from the census was symbolically significant, sustaining the fantasy that settlers were taming an uninhabited wilderness. But statistically, it was less important. In 1890 those page-963 Indians and Alaskans made up only 0.57 percent of the population, the consequence of the dwindling of Native populations and the explosion of Anglo ones.
By 1898, things were different. Spain’s colonies were not sparsely settled. In fact, they were more densely populated than the United States was. Their populations were large, too: experts estimated nearly 8 million in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. That was more than 10 percent of the U.S. population and nearly equal to the size of the African American population (8.8 million). Further, given the serious doubts at the time as to whether Anglo-Saxons could live in the tropics, it seemed unlikely that the inhabitants of Spain’s island colonies would ever be displaced by whites in the way that the Native Americans had.
This was, in other words, a different kind of expansion, reminiscent of the failed vision for Indian Country. Not taking land and flooding it with settlers, but conquering subject populations and ruling them. “It is one thing to admit scattered communities of white, or nearly white, men into the rights of citizenship,” one writer put it, “but quite a different matter to act in the same way with a closely packed and numerous brown people.” Or as the skeptical Speaker of the House put it, less politely, “I s’posed we had niggers enough in this country without buyin’ any more of ’em.”
Yet opponents of empire, such as the Speaker, could do little about the heady rush that gripped the country in 1898. The economic tumult at home, the scramble for colonies abroad, the collapse of Spain, and Commodore Dewey’s stunning naval triumph—it all came quickly, and it all pointed in the same direction. Anti-imperialists who had successfully blocked expansion into the tropics for decades found the ground crumbling underfoot. Before the war, they had won unanimous passage for a law preventing the United States from annexing Cuba. But now, with war fever high and with the military actually in Spain’s colonies, they could only watch in mute astonishment as the machine rolled past Cuba, on to nearby Puerto Rico, far-off Guam, and the enormous Philippines.
And it kept rolling. With the logjam broken, expansionists seized the moment to push through long-stalled legislation to acquire Hawai‘i, an island kingdom whose economy U.S. planters had gradually taken control of. The usual reluctance to incorporate nonwhite peoples (it would be a “pigmy State of the Union,” scoffed the Chicago Herald) could no longer hold in the face of the argument that Dewey required Hawai‘i to control the Pacific. “We ought to take Hawaii, in the interests of the White race,” Roosevelt pressed. And so, over the protests of Native Hawaiians, more than thirty-eight thousand of whom had signed anti-annexation petitions, the United States seized the islands.
The next two years, 1899–1900, saw the United States annexing half of Samoa, another Pacific stronghold that had long been of interest, along with the uninhabited Wake Island.
By the time the shooting stopped and the treaties were ratified, the United States had gained more than seven thousand islands holding 8.5 million people. Counting Alaska, the overseas empire encompassed an area nearly as large as the entire United States had been in 1784 and held a population of more than twice the size.
This was, not surprisingly, a controversial matter. During the war, during the congressional debates over the treaty with Spain, and during the heated election of 1900, the question of empire was argued at high volume.
In essence, it was an argument about a trilemma. Republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion—the country could have at most two. In the past, republicanism and white supremacy had been jointly maintained by carefully shaping the country’s borders. But absorbing populous nonwhite colonies would wreck all that.
The opponents of empire gathered behind William Jennings Bryan, who had run against McKinley in 1896 and did so again in 1900. Bryan delighted in exposing the contradictions between republicanism and empire. The inalienable rights of man and the injustice of taxation without representation—these were bedrock political values. But imagine, Bryan warned, what would happen if the United States took colonies. Anyone setting forth to speak about republican virtues—say, at a Fourth of July celebration—would be urged to keep silent “lest his utterances excite rebellion among distant subjects.”
It was a compelling argument, and Bryan commanded a large and motley coalition of anti-imperialists. It included such African Americans as W.E.B. Du Bois and hard-line white supremacists such as Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina. Businessmen (Andrew Carnegie, who offered to buy the Philippines for $20 million so he could set it free) and labor leaders (Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL) joined the cause. So did the presidents of Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Michigan, and Northwestern.
But empire, once seized, was hard to drop. Roosevelt wanted it, and behind him stood the bulk of the Republican political establishment. For many, it was a matter of more than just the economic benefits that Alfred Thayer Mahan had promised. As they saw it, overseas colonization was the next phase of Manifest Destiny, the next outlet for the Daniel Boones of the country. “God has given us this Pacific empire for civilization,” said Senator Albert Beveridge. “A hundred wildernesses are to be subdued. Unpenetrated regions must be explored. Unviolated valleys must be tilled. Unmastered forests must be felled.”
The imperialists offered a different solution to the trilemma. They were willing to sacrifice republicanism, at least as applied to so-called backward races. Roosevelt scorned those “who cant about ‘liberty’ and the ‘consent of the governed,’ in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men.” He continued: “Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States.”
There was, of course, a third option: jettison white supremacy. The overseas territories could be treated as embryonic states and their inhabitants as full citizens. This solution commanded a great deal of enthusiasm within the territories themselves, where political parties in Puerto Rico and the Philippines inserted demands for statehood into their platforms. With the western continental territories in mind, they imagined their countries, in time, entering the union as equals.
Yet mainland support for this was scant. When the prospect of statehood came up, it did so mainly as a scare tactic—a way for anti-imperialists to underscore the horrors resulting from annexing these places.
At any rate, colonized subjects had little chance to press their case. What is remarkable, in fact, about the mainland debates over empire is how utterly absent Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, and other inhabitants of the territories were from them. Most mainlanders had never even seen a Filipino, a Puerto Rican, or a Hawaiian.
It was precisely to address the yawning chasm of ignorance around the colonies that a group of Omaha businessmen staged the First Greater America Colonial Exposition. The late nineteenth century was a great time for fairs, and this one pulled out all the usual stops: mock battles, speeches, parades, and a “World’s Congress of Beauties.” The main attraction, though, was colonized people. The organizers promised “over a thousand natives of Uncle Sam’s insular possessions”—Filipinos, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Hawaiians. The Filipino contingent would include not only “civilized Tagals” but “half-wild, monkey-like dwarfs of the interior of Luzon.”
Ostensibly, this was a way for the public to meet the people at the center of the empire controversy. But it’s telling to note how the public would meet them: not giving lectures or speaking with fairgoers, but living on display in model villages, as if they were animals in a zoo.
A “large encampment of Indians from all the various tribes of the great West” would be there, too, just to round out the picture.
Fulfilling these promises meant recruiting colonized subjects and hauling them to the mainland. This wasn’t easy. Even with the support of the army and the personal backing of President McKinley, the fair’s organizers could induce only thirty-five Filipinos to board the USS Indiana for San Francisco. And getting them onto the ship turned out to be the easy part. When the Indiana arrived, immigration authorities wouldn’t let them disembark.
The Filipinos, languishing for days on board, protested. They were, they maintained, U.S. citizens, fully entitled to move from one part of their new country to another. But the port officers refused to budge. In their eyes, the Filipinos were foreigners and, worse, Asian foreigners, subject to the same racial exclusion laws that prevented Chinese workers from entering.
The Greater America Exposition, Omaha, 1899
The Greater America Exposition had intended to explore the questions of empire. Yet here its organizers had inadvertently raised the knottiest one of all. The territories were on the maps, yes. But were the people who lived in them “Americans”?
The Filipinos made it to Omaha (though the secretary of war had to personally promise that they would return home after the fair). There, they made an impression. “They are stylish dressers,” wrote the Omaha Bee, resembling less a “race of savages” than “a lot of dudes” with their canes, derby hats, and white trousers. Fairgoers expecting the Filipino band to offer exotic folk music were surprised when it struck up a lively rendition of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” the theme song for Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Culturally, the fair’s Filipinos seemed to embrace their new nationality.
Legally, however, things remained unresolved. The Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Did that include the territories?
The 1898–1900 annexations had already raised the question of what the United States was, in language and on maps. Now it was coming up in law. And it made its way to the Supreme Court, via a series of connected cases, in 1901.
Weighty legal questions often turn around trivial disputes. Certainly the cases that carried this question up to the Supreme Court seemed piddling: whether an importer shipping oranges from Puerto Rico to New York had to pay a tariff, or whether a soldier returning from the Philippines owed taxes on the diamond rings he’d acquired there. But under them lay a deeper question. The Constitution prohibits taxing commerce between parts of the United States. Did that rule cover the overseas territories, too? In other words, were they part of the country?
The government, which had collected the tariffs, sought to defend its actions. It argued that the term the United States was ambiguous. The name could refer to all the area under U.S. jurisdiction, but it could also refer, in a narrower sense, to the union of states. The Constitution’s references to “the United States,” the argument continued, were meant in that narrow sense, to refer to the states alone. Territories thus had no right to constitutional protections, for the simple reason that the Constitution didn’t apply to them. As one justice summarized the logic, the Constitution was “the supreme law of the land,” but the territories were “not part of the ‘land.’”
This might have come as a surprise to residents of the western territories, who had assumed that they had the same constitutional protections as their compatriots in the states. But, the attorney general maintained, that was a polite fiction with little basis in law. Mincing few words, he reminded the justices that Congress could impose laws on the territories “without asking the consent of the inhabitants, even against their consent and against their protest, as it has frequently done.” He brought up Congress’s dismantling of Indian Country, and he noted that Alaskans had “no right to elect a single officer, or to form a city, or to establish a political system or anything whatever for their own protection.” The overseas territories—which he referred to openly as “colonies”—were no different. The Filipinos in San Francisco Bay had it wrong; they were subjects, not citizens.
This was precisely the sort of talk that raised anti-imperialists’ hackles, but the attorney general plowed on. “To be called an American subject is no disgrace,” he consoled. Moreover, he continued, the government needed the ability to rule its possessions as colonies. This was the age of empire. What if the United States were to annex Egypt, Sudan, part of Central Africa, or “a section of the Chinese Empire”? Would it be forced to apply the Constitution to those places, too? “A great world power, extending its domain from the frozen seas on the North to where the encircling palm trees grow in the Pacific islands, must not be bound by rules too strict or too confining.”
The argument prevailed. The court affirmed that “the Constitution deals with states” and that territorial rights were at Congress’s discretion. Congress could, if it wished, “incorporate” territories into the union and bring them under the protection of the Constitution, as the court judged that it had in the case of the western territories. Some years later, the court also concluded that Alaska and Hawai‘i, the territories beyond the mainland that seemed the most conducive to white settlement, had also been “incorporated.” But the point was that incorporation was not automatic, and the court repeatedly denied that Congress had ever incorporated the former Spanish colonies.
Invoking the notion that there were different “senses” of “the United States,” a concurring justice articulated the reasoning in a notoriously convoluted phrase. Puerto Rico was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” he explained, “because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”
Lawyers with long memories would have recognized in that unusual word, appurtenant, a reference to the Navassa Island case of more than a decade before. There, the defense had argued that although the guano islands were “appertaining to the United States,” they weren’t part of it, and thus weren’t subject to U.S. law. The Supreme Court had disagreed. But whereas the Navassa case had affirmed the government’s power to apply federal laws in its territories, the new rulings denied territorial inhabitants the right to federal protections.
The 1901 rulings are collectively known as the Insular Cases (the term can also encompass some later cases). But they are not the cases for which the turn-of-the-century court is best known. Eight of the nine justices who decided the 1901 Insular Cases also decided Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the notorious case that upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” Jim Crow institutions.
On the face of it, the two rulings have much in common. Plessy permitted segregation, the division of the country into separate spaces, some reserved for whites, others for nonwhites. The Insular Cases split the country into what one justice called “practically two national governments,” one bound by the Bill of Rights, the other not.
And, like Plessy, the Insular Cases were about race. The main majority decision contained warnings about including “savages” and “alien races” within the constitutional fold. Doing so, one of the justices concurred, would “wreck our institutions,” perhaps leading the “whole structure of the government” to be “overthrown.”
Yet there is one critical difference between Plessy and the Insular Cases. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court overturned Plessy, declaring “separate but equal” facilities to be incapable of securing equality under the law. Today we regard Plessy as one of the court’s greatest mistakes, an infamously racist ruling that warped the Constitution to deprive millions of citizens of their rights.
The Insular Cases are far less well-known. Until very recently, it was not unusual for constitutional scholars to have never heard of them. But they are nevertheless still on the books, and they are still cited as good law. The court has repeatedly upheld the principle that the Constitution applies to some parts of the country but not others. That’s why a citizen on the mainland has a constitutional right to trial by jury, but when that citizen travels to Puerto Rico, the right vanishes.
Similarly, the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee to anyone born in the United States doesn’t apply to the unincorporated territories. In them, citizenship came late and only after struggle. What is more, it arrived as “statutory citizenship,” meaning that it was secured by legislation rather than by the Constitution and could therefore be rescinded.
Puerto Ricans became citizens in 1917, U.S. Virgin Islanders in 1927, and Guamanians in 1950, though in all cases, because their citizenship is statutory, it can be revoked. Filipinos were never made citizens in their forty-seven years under U.S. rule. American Samoans, despite having been “American” since 1900, are still legally only “U.S. nationals.” They are allowed to fight in the armed forces, which they do in extraordinary numbers—theirs is ranked top of all 885 U.S. Army recruiting stations. But they are not citizens, as the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to them.
The significance of the Insular Cases goes beyond the law. In distinguishing between “incorporated” and “unincorporated” parts of the United States, these cases enshrined the notion that some places in the country weren’t truly part of the country. Some territories—namely, the ones filling up with white settlers—could hope for statehood. Others would hang, as the chief justice put it, like a “disembodied shade, in an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.”
That “indefinite period” continues to this day. All the territories that the court deemed “incorporated” have become states. All the territories that it ruled “unincorporated” remain territories. Today, around four million people live in those unincorporated territories—people who have no representation in Congress, who cannot vote for president, and whose rights and citizenship remain a gift from Washington. They could seek statehood, as indeed a large number in Puerto Rico would like to do. But statehood is, like so many other things, at the sole discretion of Congress—a legislative body in which neither Puerto Ricans nor other colonial subjects have a vote.