The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
|
AHC |
American Historical Collection, Rizal Library, Ateneo de Manila University |
|
Albizu FBI File |
FBIPR Files, Pedro Albizu Campos, FBI File No. 105–11898, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York |
|
APP |
Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, www |
|
Burnham Collection |
Daniel H. Burnham Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Art Institute of Chicago |
|
CHF |
Othmer Library of Chemical History, Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia |
|
CWS |
Chemical Warfare Service, Record Group 175, NACP |
|
DH |
Diplomatic History |
|
FDR Library |
Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum |
|
FO |
Founders Online, National Archives, founders.archives.gov |
|
Forbes Diary |
W. Cameron Forbes Diary, W. Cameron Forbes Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress |
|
FRUS |
Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, DC) |
|
Gruening Papers |
Ernest Gruening Papers, Alaska and Polar Regions Department, Archives and Manuscripts, University of Alaska, Fairbanks |
|
HC–DC |
Office of the High Commissioner of the Philippines, Records of the Washington, DC, Office, 1942–46, ROT |
|
HC–Manila |
Office of the High Commissioner of the Philippine Islands, Records of the Manila Office, 1935–46, ROT |
|
HC–Pol/Econ |
Office of the High Commissioner of the Philippines, Records Concerning Political and Economic Matters, 1927–1946, ROT |
|
HSA |
Hawai‘i State Archives, Honolulu |
|
HWRD |
Hawai‘i War Records Depository, Archives and Manuscripts Department, University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa |
|
LTR |
The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cambridge, MA, 1952) |
|
MPD |
Maddison Project Database, January 2013 update, Groningen Growth and Development Centre, www |
|
NACP |
United States National Archives, College Park, Maryland |
|
NADC |
United States National Archives, Washington, DC |
|
Nicholson Scrapbooks |
A. J. Nicholson, Scrapbooks Relating to the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley |
|
NLP |
National Library of the Philippines, Manila |
|
Notter Records |
Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State, Records of Harley A. Notter, 1939–1945, NACP |
|
NYT |
The New York Times |
|
Padover File |
Specialized Functions, Records of the Research Unit on Territorial Policy, Reference File of Saul K. Padover, ROT |
|
Pershing Papers |
Papers of John J. Pershing, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress |
|
Rem. |
Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (New York, 1964) |
|
Reynolds Papers |
Ruth M. Reynolds Papers, Archives of the Puerto Rican Diaspora, Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, Hunter College, City University of New York |
|
ROT |
Records of the Office of Territories, Record Group 126, NACP |
|
Stat. |
United States Statutes |
|
Tydings Papers |
Papers of Millard E. Tydings, Special Collections, Hornbake Library, University of Maryland, College Park |
|
WTR |
The Works of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1926) |
INTRODUCTION: LOOKING BEYOND THE LOGO MAP
Salanga: Alfrredo Navarro Salanga, “They Don’t Think Much About Us in America,” in Poems 1980–1988: Turtle Voices in Uncertain Weather (Manila, 1989), 180–81.
The army’s official history: Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines (Washington, DC, 1953), 88.
“Pearl Harbor” wasn’t how people: The etymology of that term, which debuted in the Portland Oregonian two days after the attack, is discussed in Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, NC, 2003), 16.
JAPS BOMB MANILA, HAWAII, etc.: Beth Bailey and David Farber, “The Attack on Pearl Harbor … and Guam, Wake Island, Philippines, Thailand, Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong: December 7/8, the Pacific World, American Empire, and the American Political Imaginary,” in Pearl Harbor and the Attacks of December 8, 1941: A Pacific History, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, KS, forthcoming).
Sumner Welles: Sumner Welles Papers, Speeches and Writings, “Speech Draft, December 8, 1941,” 16, FDR Library.
Eleanor Roosevelt: Speech, December 7, 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Speech and Article File, December 1941–January 1942, FDR Library.
“bombing in Oahu,” etc.: Draft 1, Significant Documents Collection, FDR Library.
Polls taken: Earl S. Pomeroy, Pacific Outpost: American Strategy in Guam and Micronesia (Stanford, CA, 1951), 140. Another factor that probably contributed to Roosevelt’s editing of the manuscript was confusion as to whether the Philippines had been struck. It’s possible that Roosevelt’s inclusion and then deletion of the Philippines was in response to an initial false report that the Philippines had been hit and then a retraction. Yet Roosevelt continued to edit that same draft into the night of December 7, by which time the Philippines had been attacked and Roosevelt knew it—he penciled in the Philippines and Guam on the list of targets. If Roosevelt crossed the Philippines out because of the retraction, the question becomes why he didn’t, once he had a correct report of the Philippine raid, revert to his original “Hawaii and the Philippines” formulation (or, for that matter, change it to “Hawaii, the Philippines, and Guam”). On these issues, see my chapter and Bailey and Farber’s chapter in their edited collection, Pearl Harbor.
“very much in passing,” etc.: John Hersey, Men on Bataan (New York, 1942), 365.
called them, colonies: WTR, 11:250; Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (New York, 1902), 5:295.
“The word colony”: Quoted in Rebecca Tinio McKenna, American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines (Chicago, 2017), 110.
“logo map”: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York, 2006), 179. The theoretical foundation for the logo map is Thongchai Winichakul’s concept of the “geo-body” from Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu, 1994).
Greater United States map: Inspired by Bill Rankin’s map, “The Territory of the United States,” 2007, radicalcartography.net/us-territory.
“Greater United States”: Term discussed in Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” DH 40 (2016): 378–81.
fifth largest: Bouda Etemad, Possessing the World: Taking the Measurements of Colonisation from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, trans. Andrene Everson (New York, 2007), 131.
12.6 percent: This includes military personnel.
one in twelve was African American: Immerwahr, “Greater United States,” 376. The count of African Americans includes those in the territories.
seventh-grade girls: Letters collected in “World’s Colonies—General” folder, box 67; 9-0-1, Administrative, World’s Colonies; Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907–1951; ROT.
“Although Hawaii”: Helen Johnson of Rand McNally to Donna Kowalski, circa 1942, in ibid.
“We believe,” etc.: Barbara Frederick to Harold Ickes, January 14, 1943, in ibid.
official clarified: Ruth Hampton to Barbara Frederick, January 30, 1943, in ibid.
1910 report: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States, vol. 1, Population: 1910 (Washington, DC, 1913), 17.
“Most people”: Saul Padover, “The Overseas Expansion Policy of the U.S.,” c. 1943, “Reports” folder, box 12, Padover File.
“global American empire”: Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present, rev. ed. (New York, 1995), 492.
“traveling the same path”: Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny (1999; Washington, DC, 2002), 6.
case can be made: A helpful overview is Paul A. Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review (2011): 1348–91.
Du Bois: See especially his Dark Princess: A Romance (New York, 1928) and Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York, 1945).
211 times in 67 countries: Barbara Salazar Torreon, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2016, Congressional Research Service Report R42738, 2016. This doesn’t count routine stationing of troops, covert operations, or disaster relief.
“worst chapter”: James A. Field Jr., “American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 644–68.
assiduously researched: Key works are listed in Immerwahr, “Greater United States.” Two very recent books are also worth mentioning: Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Anne Stephens, eds., Archipelagic American Studies (Durham, NC, 2017), and A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ, 2018).
confusion and shoulder-shrugging: This can be seen not only in textbooks but higher up the academic food chain, in the flagship research journal in U.S. history, the Journal of American History. The Philippines was the United States’ largest colony by an order of magnitude, yet in the past fifty years the JAH has published only one research article about it (i.e., only one non-review article mentioning the Philippines in its title). That article, Walter L. Williams’s “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” was published in 1980. Inevitably, it covered 1898 and its immediate aftermath.
Philippine bill was the basis: Alvita Akiboh, “Pocket-Sized Imperialism: U.S. Designs on Colonial Currency,” DH 41 (2017): 874.
135 million: Immerwahr, “Greater United States,” 388.
eight hundred overseas military bases: David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York, 2015), 4.
Rankin: William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016).
Boone: In the following account, I’ve relied on John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York, 1992); Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, 1996); and Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Baton Rouge, LA, 2008).
“So rich a soil”: Felix Walker, quoted in Brown, Frontiersman, 73.
“first white man”: Timothy Flint, The First White Man of the West (Cincinnati, 1856).
European literature: On Boone’s European reception, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT, 1973), chaps. 10–11.
wasn’t much revered: Louise Phelps Kellogg, “The Fame of Daniel Boone,” Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 32 (1934): 187–98.
“Had the horses”: New-York American, reprinted in the Alexandria Gazette, July 11, 1826.
nation’s “refuse”: Benjamin Franklin, The Interest of Great Britain Considered, 1760, FO. On early scorn of frontier dwellers, see David Andrew Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (Charlottesville, VA, 2008).
“no better”: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Others Essays, ed. Dennis D. Moore (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 33.
“white savages”: John Jay to Thomas Jefferson, December 14, 1786, FO. I have modernized eighteenth-century capitalization throughout this chapter.
“settling, or rather”: Washington to James Duane, September 7, 1783, FO.
“exceedingly familiar and friendly”: Boone, quoted in Brown, Frontiersman, 137.
This was exactly the sort: My account of Washington and the West draws heavily on Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York, 2005), chap. 4. Another crucial guide is Colin G. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of a Nation (New York, 2018).
“murders, and general dissatisfaction”: September 12, 1784, The Diaries of George Washington, ed. Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig (Charlottesville, VA, 1978), 4:19.
“labour very little,” etc.: Ibid., October 4, 1784, 4:66.
“become too open, violent”: Washington to Jefferson, September 15, 1792, FO.
“first and only”: Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York, 2005), 225.
“compact” manner: Washington to Duane, September 7, 1793, FO. An excellent overview of the resistance to western settlement is Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ, 2017), chaps. 2–3.
(55 percent) was covered by states: Calculated from Franklin K. Van Zandt, Boundaries of the United States and the Several States (Washington, DC, 1966), 262–64, and Thomas Donaldson, The Public Domain: Its History, with Statistics (Washington, DC, 1884), 87–88.
“equal footing”: Northwest Territory Ordinance of 1787, 1 Stat. 51, section 14, article 5.
“In effect”: Monroe to Jefferson, May 11, 1786, FO.
“despotic oligarchy”: Jefferson to Henry Innes, January 23, 1800, FO.
“poor devil”: St. Clair to Alexander Hamilton, August 9, 1793, FO.
“dependent colony” … “citizens” … “subjects”: Arthur St. Clair, quoted in Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington, IN, 1987), 71.
“white Indians”: Quoted in Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, OH, 1986), 8.
“ignorant” … “ill qualified”: St. Clair, quoted in Onuf, Statehood and Union, 70. On the imperial features of territorial government, see (besides above-cited works by Onuf, Cayton, and Frymer) Whitney T. Perkins, Denial of Empire: The United States and Its Dependencies (Leiden, Netherlands, 1962), chap. 1; Jack Ericson Eblen, The First and Second United States Empires: Governors and Territorial Government, 1784–1912 (Pittsburgh, 1968), chap. 2; and Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York, 2011), chap. 1.
“This Constitution never was”: Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d sess., 1811, 537.
“incapable of self-government”: Quoted in Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence, KS, 2006), 22.
largest contingent of the army: Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, CT, 2004), 90.
“mental darkness” … “dangerous experiment”: Quoted in Perkins, Denial of Empire, 21.
“Do political axioms”: Pierre Sauve, Pierre Derbigny, and Jean Noël Destrehan, “Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana Against the Political System Adopted by Congress for Them,” 1804, in American State Papers, 10, Miscellaneous, 1:397.
did nothing: Kastor, Nation’s Crucible, 58–60.
“cover the whole” … “distant times”: Jefferson to James Monroe, November 24, 1801, FO. On Jeffersonians versus Federalists regarding territorial government, see Cayton, Frontier Republic.
“wide and fruitful”: Jefferson, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, APP.
“I told him no”: Robert R. Livingston to James Madison, April 11, 1803, FO.
“the best use”: Jefferson to John Breckinridge, August 12, 1803, FO.
“shut up”: Jefferson to John Dickinson, August 9, 1803, FO.
“advancing compactly”: Jefferson to Breckinridge, August 12, 1803, FO.
European populations had grown: MPD.
the best available statistics: Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Franklin as Demographer,” Journal of Economic History 9 (1949): 25–26.
Disease took so many: Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC, 1988), 82.
one to two miles a year: Dale Van Every, Ark of Empire: The American Frontier, 1784–1803 (New York, 1963), 21.
Franklin was the first: Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. (Boston, 1755), 9. On the foundation for Franklin’s calculations, see William F. Von Valtier, “‘An Extravagant Assumption’: The Demographic Numbers Behind Benjamin Franklin’s Twenty-Five-Year Doubling Period,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155 (2011): 158–88.
“rapidity of increase”: Thomas Robert Malthus, First Essay on Population (London, 1798), 105.
Malthus, in turn: Joyce E. Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin’s Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity (Washington, DC, 2009), 45.
1890 census: Conway Zirkle, “Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Malthus and the United States Census,” Isis 48 (1957): 62.
surpassed that of Britain: MPD.
population of France: U.S. and French figures from MPD. For my understanding of U.S. population growth, I am indebted to D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT, 1993), and James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, UK, 2009).
nearly forty miles a year: Van Every, Ark of Empire, 21.
influxes from Europe and Africa: Michael R. Haines, “The Population of the United States, 1790–1920,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 2:153.
“Wave after wave”: Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bouh, Organization of a New Indian Territory East of the Missouri River (New York, 1850), 3.
the cities the settlers built: On Cincinnati and Chicago: Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 196, 1.
“homesteads”: This transformation is helpfully discussed in Frymer, Building an American Empire, and Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, DC, 1968), chaps. 10 and 15.
“most infamous system”: Earl S. Pomeroy, The Territories and the United States, 1861–1890: Studies in Colonial Administration (Philadelphia, 1947), 104.
Appointed governors … new territories: Eblen, First and Second U.S. Empires, 140.
“manifest destiny”: “Annexation,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July–August 1845, 5. Though the unsigned article has long been attributed to the magazine’s editor, John L. O’Sullivan, Linda S. Hudson has used textual analysis to argue that it was “likely written” by Jane Cazneau. Mistress of Manifest Destiny: A Biography of Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807–1878 (Austin, TX, 2001), 61.
Thornton: Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 (Norman, OK, 1987), 32. Low and high estimates, respectively, from Alfred L. Kroeber and Henry F. Dobyns, are assessed and extrapolated at 25–26.
closer to half a million: Paul Stuart, Nations Within a Nation: Historical Statistics of American Indians (New York, 1987), 52.
the population started rebounding: Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln, NE, 1990), chap. 3. The following account of the Cherokees draws on Gary E. Moulton, John Ross: Cherokee Chief (Athens, GA, 1978); Theda Purdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York, 2007); and Brian Hicks, Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears (New York, 2011).
“It’s like Baltimore”: Hicks, Setting Sun, 148.
“like the whiteman”: John Ross, “To the Senate,” March 8, 1836, in The Papers of Chief John Ross, ed. Gary E. Moulton (Norman, OK, 1978), 1:394.
“would not be countenanced”: Andrew Jackson, Annual Message, December 8, 1829, APP.
“removal beyond” … “protection and peace”: Quoted in Moulton, Ross, 38.
“We can’t be a Nation”: Ibid., 51.
a third or half of what it would have been: Estimate is for the total population, not just the removed Cherokees. Thornton, Cherokees, 76.
“admitted as a state”: House Committee on Indian Affairs, H. Rep 474, Regulating the Indian Department, 23d Cong., 1st sess., 1834, 14.
“not republican” … “despotism”: Register of Debates, 23d Cong., 2d sess., February 20, 1835, 1447.
“add to our Union”: Register of Debates, 23d Cong., 1st sess., June 25, 1834, 4776.
“I am not prepared”: Register of Debates, 23d Cong., 2d sess., February 20, 1835, 1454.
“full-blood savage”: Ibid.
farming equipment, etc.: D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, CT, 1993), 2:99–100.
“effectual and complete”: Register of Debates, 23d Congress, 1st sess., June 25, 1834, 4764.
“Indian barrier” … “Where will they go?”: William E. Unrau, The Rise and Fall of Indian Country, 1825–1855 (Lawrence, KS, 2007), 125–26. See also Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln, NE, 2011), part II.
“She didn’t know”: Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Little House Books, ed. Caroline Fraser (New York, 2012), 287.
“‘When white settlers’”: Ibid., 366.
“I’ll not stay”: Ibid., 401.
Osages: Dennis McAuliffe Jr., The Deaths of Sybil Bolton: An American History (New York, 1994), 110–17. See also Frances W. Kaye, “Little Squatter on the Osage Diminished Reserve: Reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Kansas Indians,” Great Plains Quarterly 20 (2000): 123–40.
“The question will suggest”: McAuliffe, Sybil Bolton, 116.
By 1879, it contained: Roy Gittinger, The Formation of the State of Oklahoma, 1803–1906 (1917; Norman, OK, 1939), 264–65.
“We are here”: Congressional Record, 48th Cong., 2d sess., 505.
“No matter how little”: “The Oklahoma Boomers,” Cherokee Advocate, October 12, 1887.
“most rapid settlement”: Statistical Atlas of the United States (Washington, DC, 1914), 40.
less than one-quarter Indian: Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ, 2017), 167.
“jist plumb” … “furrin country”: Lynn Riggs, Green Grow the Lilacs (New York, 1931), 161.
“I kept”: Phyllis Cole Braunlich, Haunted by Home: The Life and Letters of Lynn Riggs (Norman, OK, 1988), 179.
“dagger pointed”: Lubna Z. Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (Lanham, MD, 2009), 86. The joke is originally Richard Edes Harrison’s.
“power of population”: Thomas Robert Malthus, First Essay on Population (London, 1798), 44.
value of “lost” human feces: George E. Waring, The Elements of Agriculture (New York, 1854), 129, discussed in Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia, 1985), 25.
“The fact is notorious”: “Selections by the Committee: Extracts from Dr. Lee’s Report in N.Y. Legislature,” Sentinel and Witness (Middletown, CT), May 7, 1845.
Davy: Humphry Davy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (London, 1813), lecture 6. On fertilizer, I’ve learned much from Ariel Ron, “Developing the Country: ‘Scientific Agriculture’ and the Roots of the Republican Party” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012).
“double tubular apparatus”: Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood (New York, 1887), 2:85.
What did work: The best accounts of guano are Wines, Fertilizer; Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York, 1994); Edward D. Melillo, “The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930,” American Historical Review 114 (2012): 1028–60; and Gregory T. Cushman, Guano and the Opening of the Pacific World: A Global Ecological History (New York, 2013).
“beastly smelling-bottle”: “Guano,” Vermont Watchman and State Journal, December 27, 1844.
“the most odious”: Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856, 1740.
Sailors hauling guano: “Beauties of Guano Digging,” New York Herald, May 3, 1845; Skaggs, Guano Rush, 160.
“cheapest, most powerful”: “Guano,” Cleveland Herald, July 19, 1844.
Tall tales: “The Effects of Guano—Munchausen Beaten All Hollow!!!” Weekly Raleigh Register and North Carolina Gazette, June 27, 1845; “Remarkable Properties of Guano,” The Floridian, September 4, 1847.
“This subject” … “The Senator”: Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856, 1741.
“Peruvian guano”: Millard Fillmore, First Annual Message, December 12, 1850, APP.
“exterminate the hated race”: Dan O’Donnell, “The Lobos Islands: American Imperialism in Peruvian Waters in 1852,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 39 (2008): 45.
“The Peruvian penguin”: London Times, October 6, 1852.
Just a single Peruvian island: Congressional Globe, 33d Cong., 1st sess., 1854, 1194.
“vast deposit” … “verdant glades”: James Fenimore Cooper, The Crater, or, Vulcan’s Peak (New York, 1847), 1:186, 185.
capitalization of $10 million: Skaggs, Guano Rush, 54; federal expenditures in 1850 were $44.8 million according to U.S. Department of the Treasury, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of Finances for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1934, 1935, 303.
“at the discretion”: Guano Islands Act, U.S. Code 48 (1856), §1411.
“at liberty”: Rene Bach, “Our Ocean Empire,” Morning Oregonian, July 11, 1897.
“new kind” … “consequences beyond”: Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., 1856, 1699, 1698.
“prospect of dominion,” etc.: Ibid., 1698.
fifty-nine islands … ninety-four guano islands: Skaggs, Guano Rush, 71, 199. These numbers refer to ratified claims. But some claims were vague, and I haven’t been able to confirm that every one corresponded to an actual island.
“Pacific will be ours”: Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (London, 1888), 66.
“little paradise”: Cooper, Crater, 184.
“completely encased”: Gregory Rosenthal, “Life and Labor in a Seabird Colony: Hawaiian Guano Workers, 1857–1870,” Environmental History, 17 (2012): 764.
sixty-eight of these ships mutinied: Melillo, “First Green Revolution,” 1047.
“The shark and the Kanaka”: “Life on a Guano Island,” Weekly Georgia Telegraph, May 7, 1869.
Navassa: On Navassa, I’ve relied on W. M. Alexander, The Brotherhood of Liberty, or, Our Day in Court (Baltimore, 1891); John Cashman, “‘Slaves Under Our Flag’: The Navassa Island Riot of 1889,” Maryland Historian 24 (1993): 1–21; Skaggs, Guano Rush, chap. 10; and Jennifer C. James, “‘Buried in Guano’: Race, Labor, and Sustainability,” American Literary History 24 (2012): 115–42.
“We have been treated”: “Rescued from Death,” Rocky Mountain News, October 11, 1889.
BLACK BUTCHERS: “The Black Butchers,” Galveston Daily News, October 11, 1889.
“appertain”: “The Navassa Murder Cases,” New York Age, April 19, 1890; Christina Duffy Burnett, “The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 779–803.
“unequivocally”: Jones v. United States, 137 U.S. 211 (1890).
“American citizens”: Harrison, quoted in “Sentence Commuted,” Atchison Champion, May 19, 1891.
“a convict establishment”: “The Navassa Prisoners,” New York Age, May 30, 1891.
“It is inexcusable”: Benjamin Harrison, Third Annual Message, December 9, 1891, APP.
four hundred thousand tons: Skaggs, Guano Rush, 153.
By 1914: Cushman, Guano, 155.
Haber: I’ve relied especially on Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, MA, 2001); Dietrich Stolzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew (Philadelphia, 2004); and Daniel Charles, Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chemical Warfare (New York, 2005).
2.4 billion: Smil, Enriching the Earth, 160.
“seldom has the awarding”: Charles, Master Mind, 49.
“What Fritz has gained”: Stolzenberg, Haber, 174.
president of the American Chemical Society: Julius Stieglitz, introduction to Edwin E. Slossen, Creative Chemistry (Garden City, NY, 1919), iii.
protest of her husband’s invention: Morris Goran asserts—and the assertion has often been quoted—that Clara regarded poison gas “not only as a perversion of science but also as a sign of barbarism” and “pleaded with her husband” to forsake it (The Story of Fritz Haber [Norman, OK, 1967], 71). Yet Goran offers documentation for none of this. A far more cautious account is Bretislav Friedrich and Dieter Hoffman, “Clara Haber, nee Immerwahr (1870–1915): Life, Work and Legacy,” Zeitschrift für Allgemeine und Anorganische Chemie 642 (2016): 437–88.
Powerful men: A helpful examination of presidential origins is Edward Pessen, The Log Cabin Myth: The Social Backgrounds of the Presidents (New Haven, CT, 1984).
“whitetail” … “Antelope”: WTR, 1:86, 1:403.
“A bear’s brain”: WTR, 1:241.
“manliness, self-reliance”: Quoted in Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992), 37.
surrounded by guns: The event is described in Evan Thomas, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 (New York, 2010), 53–54.
“great deeds”: WTR, 8:xliv.
“statesmen” … “unable to fully appreciate”: WTR, 8:17–18.
“peculiarly revolting”: WTR, 9:58.
“The rude, fierce settler”: WTR, 9:57.
“bloody fighting”: WTR, 1:4.
armed Sioux: WTR, vol. 1, chap. 7 of Ranch Life.
“frontier proper”: WTR, 12:254.
“frontier thesis”: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893, in The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920).
“I think you have”: Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1979), 466.
“The world is nearly”: W. T. Stead, ed., The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 190. On the closure of global frontiers, see Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, CA, 2003), chap. 1.
“like land birds”: Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890; New York, 1957), 72.
“great highway”: Ibid., 22.
tendency of bases: Walter LaFeber, in “A Note on the ‘Mercantilist Imperialism’ of Alfred Thayer Mahan,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (1962): 674–85, points out that Mahan’s calls for empire were strategic, not economic, and did not require annexing large colonies. Yet Mahan’s admiration for the British Empire is clear from Sea Power, as is his understanding that, historically, bases “naturally multiplied and grew until they became colonies” (Mahan 24).
Mahan found his ideas received: David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (New York, 2015), 22, 47–48.
“During the last two days”: Roosevelt to Mahan, May 12, 1890, in Richard W. Turk, The Ambiguous Relationship: Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan (Westport, CT, 1987), 109. There is a question, as in the case of Turner, as to whether Mahan influenced Roosevelt or merely confirmed his existing beliefs.
“I should welcome”: Roosevelt to Francis V. Greene, September 23, 1897, quoted in Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956), 37.
Spain’s grip was slipping: Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 3d ed. (New York, 2006), 120.
“civilized warfare” … “extermination”: William McKinley, Message to Congress, April 11, 1898, APP.
damsel in distress: An astute analysis of gender’s role in the affair is Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and the Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT, 1998).
“I don’t propose”: G.J.A. O’Toole, The Spanish War: An American Epic—1898 (New York, 1984), 125.
“Dirty treachery”: Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, 600.
“I have been through”: Hermann Hagedorn, Leonard Wood: A Biography (New York, 1931), 1:141.
“McKinley is bent”: O’Toole, Spanish War, 146.
“a perfect dear”: Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, 566.
“Dewey could be slipped”: WTR, 20:220.
“look after the routine”: Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time (New York, 1920), 1:86.
The Battle of Manila Bay: My account of the war from the perspective of the United States relies on David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York, 1981); O’Toole, Spanish War; and Ivan Musicant, Empire by Default: The Spanish-American War and the Dawn of the American Century (New York, 1998).
“Nineteenth century civilization”: Joseph Stickney, War in the Philippines: Life and Glorious Deeds of Admiral Dewey (Chicago, 1899), 37.
“That night”: “The Battle of Manila Bay,” The Bounding Billow, June 1898, in Nicholson Scrapbooks.
“Is his wife dead?”: Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, 612.
“the lands that have been”: WTR, 11:11.
“wilder type,” etc.: WTR, 11:17.
“most faithful and loyal”: WTR, 11:40.
Demolins’s book: WTR, 11:32.
battle for the San Juan Heights: See, in addition to the military histories cited above, Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders in WTR, vol. 11, and Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, chap. 25.
“support the regulars”: Morris, Rise of Roosevelt, 654.
“The instant I received”: WTR, 11:81.
“a thin line”: The Works of Stephen Crane, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville, VA, 1971), 9:158.
“passing the shouting”: WTR, 11:85.
“bullets were ripping”: WTR, 11:88.
killed a Spaniard: A more skeptical account is Trask, War with Spain, chap. 10.
first documentary battle footage: Bonnie M. Miller, From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War (Amherst, MA, 2011), 98.
“splendid little war”: John Hay to Roosevelt, July 29, 1898, in William Roscoe Thatcher, The Life and Letters of John Hay (Boston, 1915), 2:337.
“house of cards”: Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (New York, 1902), 5:295.
“We succeeded”: David Starr Jordan, Imperial Democracy (New York, 1899), 91.
Spain had a sizable: Spanish troops: Sebastian Balfour, The End of the Spanish Empire, 1898–1923 (Oxford, UK, 1997), 39. U.S. troops: Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire: The United States Army in the Spanish-American War (Columbia, MO, 1971), 5, 136.
a latecomer: This interpretation of the war, as regards Cuba, is advanced brilliantly in Louis A. Pérez Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998). A nearly identical case can be made for the Philippines, and Renato Constantino, A History of the Philippines: From the Spanish Colonization to the Second World War (New York, 1975), chaps. 9–12, supplies the details. On the more limited role Puerto Ricans played in dislodging Spain, see Fernando Picó, Puerto Rico 1898: The War After the War, trans. Sylvia Korwek and Psique Arana Guzmán (1987; Princeton, NJ, 2004).
“dead war” … “This war cannot last”: Pérez, Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 135.
“very great difficulties”: WTR, 11:49.
thirty thousand Spanish troops … eight thousand Spanish soldiers: Balfour, End of the Spanish Empire, 39.
TELL AGUINALDO COME: Felipe Agoncillo, To the American People (Paris, 1900), 40.
his whole force: Joseph L. Schott, The Ordeal of Samar (New York, 1964), 151.
“the greatest vigor”: Trumbull White, Our New Possessions (Chicago, 1898), 79.
“By day”: Autobiography of George Dewey, Admiral of the Navy (New York, 1913), 247.
“utter tatterdemalions”: WTR, 11:49.
“We should have been better off”: Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba Between Empires: 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh, 1983), 201.
“I will never accept”: Ibid., 209.
“willing to surrender”: Quoted in Musicant, Empire by Default, 569.
One minute after: White, Our New Possessions, 104.
“This is not the Republic”: Pérez, Cuba Between Empires, xv.
“could not have told”: Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (New York, 1989), 104.
fewer than ten U.S. citizens: Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 131.
Dewey doubted: Autobiography of George Dewey, Admiral of the Navy (New York, 1913), 185.
“I walked the floor” … “and there they are”: James F. Rusling, “Interview with President McKinley,” Christian Advocate, January 22, 1903, 137.
“It does look”: Quoted in Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago, 2001), 178. For imperial maps in general, see 38–44, 176–80.
They offered suggestions: Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” DH 40 (2016): 378–80.
“The term ‘United States of America’”: Archibald Ross Colquhoun, Greater America (New York, 1904), 253.
eleven unambiguous references: The Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Washington–Taft (1789–1913) digitally searched at APP. I counted only instances of America that clearly referred to the United States, not the Americas or the British North American colonies. George Washington, Special Message, May 31, 1790; Washington, Inaugural Address, 1793; John Adams, Inaugural Address, 1797 (used twice); Andrew Jackson, “Regarding the Nullifying Laws of South Carolina,” 1832; Martin Van Buren, Inaugural Address, 1837; James Polk, First Annual Message, 1845 (though Polk also refers to “the nations of America” in the same speech); Abraham Lincoln, “Remarks at a Fair in the Patent Office,” 1864; Chester Arthur, First Annual Message, 1881; Arthur, Third Annual Message, 1883; Grover Cleveland, Third Annual Message, 1895.
patriotic songs: Samuel F. Smith, who wrote the words of “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” called his 1831 composition “America,” but it was nevertheless known as “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and its lyrics don’t mention America. On Columbia, see Thomas J. Schlereth, “Columbia, Columbus, and Columbianism,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 937–68.
“For some thirty,” etc.: Beckles Wilson, The New America: A Study of the Imperial Republic (London, 1903), 255, 256. Wilson also noted that the British were far more likely to refer to the United States as America, often getting corrected (before 1898) by U.S. interlocutors.
In one two-week period: The ten above-cited speeches from 1789–1898 contain eleven references to America. Roosevelt, in his trip to California, used the name twelve times in ten different speeches (all in APP): Remarks at Barstow, May 7, 1903; Address at San Bernardino, May 7, 1903; Address at Pasadena, May 8, 1903; Address at Santa Barbara, May 9, 1903; Address at San Luis Obispo, May 9, 1903 (two mentions); Remarks at Stanford University, May 12, 1903; Address at the Mechanic’s Pavilion in San Francisco, May 13, 1903; Address at the Dedication of a Navy Memorial Monument in San Francisco, May 14, 1903; Address at Truckee, May 19, 1903 (two mentions); Remarks at Dunsmuir, May 20, 1903.
The anthems changed: “America the Beautiful” was originally a poem titled “Pike’s Peak,” written in 1893 by Katharine Lee Bates. It languished in obscurity, though, until it was republished (1904) and set to music (1910).
lands wrested from Mexico: Richard L. Nostrand calculates that those cessions incorporated 80,302 Mexicans into the United States, and the 1853 census report estimated the number of Indians in the new areas (including “Indians of the plains or Arkansas River”) at 205,000. Nostrand, “Mexican Americans circa 1850,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65 (1975): 378–90; J.D.B. De Bow, The Seventh Census of the United States: 1850 (Washington, DC, 1853), xciv. Together they make up 1.48 percent of the 1845 population of the United States as given in MPD. The Mexican annexations introduced an absolutely larger new population into the United States than the Louisiana Purchase did, but whether they introduced a relatively larger new population is hard to say because of poor counts of Indians.
“We have never dreamt,” etc.: Speech on the War with Mexico, January 4, 1848, in Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. Clyde Wilson and Shirley Bright Cox (Columbia, SC, 1999), 25:64, 65.
“all the territory”: Louisville Democrat, March 9, 1848, quoted in Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York, 1963), 151.
“situated in tropical waters”: Quoted in Eric T. L. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 66. Another important account of the conflict between racism and imperialism is Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, NJ, 2017).
“We do not want”: Love, Race over Empire, 32.
could not say how many Indians: Some Indians were counted, but because, by the Constitution, “Indians not taxed”—Indians living outside the U.S. political community—didn’t count toward congressional apportionment, they weren’t included in the census.
1890 census report: Department of the Interior, Report on the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, part 1, 1895, 963.
8.8 million: Statistical Atlas of the United States, 1900 (Washington, DC, 1903), 25.
“It is one thing”: Archibald R. Colquhoun, The Mastery of the Pacific (New York, 1904), 50–51.
“I s’posed”: Thomas Brackett Reed’s remark, reported in Lemuel Quigg to Theodore Roosevelt, May 16, 1913, LTR, 2:921n.
“pigmy State”: Love, Race over Empire, 103.
“We ought to take Hawaii”: Roosevelt to James Bryce, September 10, 1897, LTR, 1:672.
thirty-eight thousand of whom had signed: Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC, 2004), 151.
“lest his utterances”: Bryan, “Annexation,” 1899, in Murat Halstead, Pictorial History of America’s New Possessions (New Haven, CT, 1899), 545.
a compelling argument: On the imperialism debates, see especially Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York, 1968), and David Healy, US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison, WI, 1970).
“God has given”: Albert J. Beveridge, “The Republic’s Task,” February 1899, in Patriotic Eloquence, ed. Robert I. Fulton and Thomas C. Trueblood (New York, 1900), 33.
“who cant about ‘liberty,’” etc.: WTR, 13:329–30.
political parties in Puerto Rico and the Philippines: Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures and the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC, 2008).
all the usual stops: “Omaha’s Colonial Exposition,” Weekly Register-Call (Central City, CO), July 7, 1899.
“over a thousand”: “Greater America Exposition of 1899,” Daily Mining Record, 25 February 1899.
“civilized Tagals,” etc.: “Gossip Gather in Hotel Lobbies,” Daily Picayune (New Orleans), March 30, 1899.
“large encampment”: Greater America Exposition (Omaha, 1899), 13.
thirty-five Filipinos: The story is from Michael C. Hawkins, “Undecided Empire: The Travails of Imperial Representation of Filipinos at the Greater America Exposition, 1899,” Philippine Studies 63 (2015): 341–63.
“They are stylish,” etc.: Ibid., 356–57.
series of connected cases: On the Insular Cases, see especially Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution (Durham, NC, 2001); Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence, KS, 2006); and Gerald L. Neuman and Tomiko Brown-Nagin, eds., Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of American Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2015).
“the supreme law”: Dorr v. United States, 195 U.S. 138, 155 (1904) (Harlan, J., dissenting).
“without asking” … “no right to elect”: John W. Griggs, in The Insular Cases, Comprising the Records, Briefs, and Arguments of Counsel in the Insular Cases of the October Term, 1900, in the Supreme Court of the United States (Washington, DC, 1901), 333, 282.
“To be called” … “section of the Chinese Empire” … “A great world power”: Ibid., 314, 367, 338.
“the Constitution deals”: Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 251 (1901).
“foreign to the United States”: Downes, 182 U.S. at 341 (White, J., concurring).
“two national governments”: Downes, 182 U.S. at 380 (Harlan, J., dissenting). For an important caution about the degree to which the Insular Cases carved out a new “extraconstitutional zone” of unincorporated territories, see Christina Duffy Burnett, “Untied States: American Expansion and Territorial Deannexation,” University of Chicago Law Review 72 (2005): 797–879.
“savages” … “alien races”: Downes, 182 U.S. at 279 and 287.
“wreck our institutions,” etc.: Downes, 182 U.S. at 313 (White, J., concurring).
not unusual for constitutional scholars: Sanford Levinson, “Installing the Insular Cases into the Canon of Constitutional Law,” in Duffy Burnett and Marshall, Foreign in a Domestic Sense, 122–23.
ranked top of all 885: As of September 9, 2014, according to the U.S. Army Reserve, www
“disembodied shade”: Downes, 182 U.S. at 372 (Fuller, C. J., dissenting).
Greater America Exposition: “Omaha’s Colonial Exposition,” Weekly Register-Call (Central City, CO), July 7, 1899.
“there was something pathetic”: “Back from the Wars,” Denver Evening Post, July 2, 1899.
“The Americans, not from mercenary motives”: Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 7708.
“Under the protection”: Declaration of Philippine Independence, in Sulpicio Guevara, ed., The Laws of the First Philippine Republic (Manila, 1972), 204.
the business of state-building: Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 98–100.
“commemorating the flag”: Declaration of Philippine Independence, 206.
“no joint occupation”: Executive Order, August 17, 1898, APP.
“Yankee Beer Chute”: David Starr Jordan, Imperial Democracy (New York, 1899), 96.
Prostitutes: Ken De Bevoise, Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines (Princeton, NJ, 1995), 86–87.
“received in the Revolutionary camp”: Emilio Aguinaldo, True Version of the Philippine Revolution (Tarlac, Philippines, 1899), 42.
“to be extended”: Executive Order, December 21, 1898, APP.
“violent and aggressive”: John Morgan Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Westport, CT, 1973), 38.
inaugural banquet: Renato Constantino, A History of the Philippines: From the Spanish Colonization to the Second World War (New York, 1975), 216.
thirty thousand of them fled: Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother: America’s Forgotten Bid for Empire Which Cost 250,000 Lives (London, 1961), 202.
“Within an area”: “The Big Scare,” unknown paper, January 24, 1899, in Nicholson Scrapbooks.
“I thought the best thing,” etc.: Interview with Grayson in Congressional Record, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 7634.
war had begun: There are many histories of the Philippine War, especially between 1899 and 1902. I’ve relied especially on Glenn Anthony May, Battle for Batangas: A Philippine Province at War (New Haven, CT, 1991); De Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse; Reynaldo C. Ileto, Knowing America’s Colony: A Hundred Years from the Philippine War (Manoa, 1999); Resil B. Mojares, The War Against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu: 1899–1906 (Quezon City, 1999); Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence, KS, 2000); Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 (New York, 2002); Kramer, Blood of Government; and David J. Silbey, A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (New York, 2007).
Someone following the war: On troop sizes, see Linn, Philippine War, 42.
238 U.S. casualties: Ibid., 52.
lacked rifles … spears … bows and arrows … the “battalion”: Wolff, Little Brown Brother, 207, 219.
gathered tin cans: May, Batangas, 173–74.
melted church bells … matches … tree resins: Mojares, War Against the Americans, 75, 223n22.
pearl divers: James R. Arnold, The Moro War: How America Battled a Muslim Insurgency in the Philippine Jungle, 1902–1913 (New York, 2011), 100.
“residual army”: Emilio Aguinaldo with Vicente Albano Pacis, A Second Look at America (New York, 1957), 97.
Tinio: Orlino A. Ochosa, The Tinio Brigade: Anti-American Resistance in the Ilocos Provinces, 1899–1901 (Quezon City, 1989), 30.
seized the capital: What was a “capital” and what simply a headquarters is hard to tell. I’m relying on Aguinaldo’s own account from Second Look at America, 109.
a single fatality: “The Capture of Malolos,” Manila Freedom, April 2, 1899.
“no organized insurgent force”: MacArthur to Theodore Schwan, November 23, 1899, in Annual Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1900, 1900, 275.
double, then triple: Frank Hindman Golay, Face of Empire: United States–Philippine Relations, 1898–1946 (Madison, WI, 1998), 65.
One boy at the time: Carlos P. Romulo, Mother America: A Living Story of Democracy (Garden City, NY, 1943), 27.
“I have been reluctantly compelled”: James H. Blount, The American Occupation of the Philippines, 1898–1912 (New York, 1913), 24.
“largest man” … Twain reread Kim: Leland Krauth, Mark Twain and Company: Six Literary Reflections (Athens, GA, 2003), 215. See chap. 6 for the many connections between the two writers.
“Take up”: Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden: An Address to the United States,” London Times, February 4, 1899.
“red-hot imperialist,” etc.: “Mark Twain Home, an Anti-Imperialist,” New York Herald, October 15, 1900, in Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Jim Zwick (Syracuse, NY, 1992), 5.
“two Americas”: Twain, “To a Person Sitting in Darkness,” 1901, in ibid., 33–34.
“Governments derive”: Ibid., xxx. Emphasis mine.
modified flag: Ibid., 39.
“criminal aggression”: Democratic Party Platform of 1900, APP.
“Anti-Doughnut”: Twain, “Speech on Municipal Corruption,” in Zwick, Twain’s Weapons, 14–15.
his literary estate: Jim Zwick, “Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialist Writings in the ‘American Century,’” in Shaw and Francia, Vestiges of War, 38–56.
“little brown brothers”: Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven, CT, 1982), 134, 296–97.
“I’m only a common”: “The Little Brown Brother,” Life, October 15, 1903, 372.
soldiers preferred gugu: On racial insults, see Kramer, Blood of Government, 124–30.
“I Don’t Like a Nigger Nohow”: Willard B. Gatewood Jr., “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1920 (Urbana, IL, 1971), 244.
black soldiers: George P. Marks III, ed., The Black Press Views American Imperialism (New York, 1971); Willard B. Gatewood Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1913 (Urbana, IL, 1975).
Fagen: Michael C. Robinson and Frank N. Schubert, “David Fagen: An Afro-American Rebel in the Philippines, 1899–1901,” Pacific Historical Review 44 (1975): 80.
sanitation, road-building, and education: Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags; Linn, Philippine War, 200–206; and Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA, 2006), chap. 3.
“hikers”: Oscar V. Campomanes, “Casualty Figures of the American Soldier and the Other: Post–1898 Allegories of Imperial Nation-Building as ‘Love and War,’” in Shaw and Francia, Vestiges of War, 134–62.
Perhaps Filipinos helped: The complex issue of collaboration is treated skillfully and sensitively in Mojares, War Against the Americans, chap. 9.
“blind giant”: Ileto, Knowing America’s Colony, 28.
“reconcentration”: See especially ibid, lecture 1, and May, Batangas.
“sounds awful”: Forbes Diary, 1:1, August 22, 1904.
more than one hundred members: Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures and the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC, 2008).
“Let the stream”: Constantino, History of the Philippines, 229.
“We crushed”: Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York, 1968), 162.
“drastic measures,” etc.: MacArthur, quoted in Linn, Philippine War, 306.
Balangiga: Rolando O. Borrinaga, The Balangiga Conflict Revisited (Quezon City, 2003).
“Half the people”: Helen Herron Taft, Recollections of Full Years (New York, 1914), 225.
“They have sown”: Joseph L. Schott, The Ordeal of Samar (New York, 1964), 55.
“Lay them on their backs”: Quoted in Richard Franklin Pettigrew, The Course of Empire: An Official Record (New York, 1920), 285.
“I want no prisoners” … “The interior of Samar”: Schott, Ordeal, 78, 98.
increasingly hard to win support: On revolutionaries’ difficulties in commanding loyalty, see Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags, 225–30, and Brian McAllister Linn, The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), 18–19, 167–68.
“Water Cure in the P.I.”: May, Batangas, 147, discussed in Kramer, Blood of Government, 141.
“savages,” etc.: WTR, 9:58, 57.
“nobody was”: Roosevelt to Speck von Sternberg, July 19, 1902, LTR, 3:297–98.
“Taken in the full”: “Court Martial of General Smith,” The Army and Navy Journal, July 19, 1902, 1166.
“The country was”: Boston Transcript, 1902, quoted in Moorfield Storey and Marcial P. Lichauco, The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States (New York, 1926), 121–22.
died from disease: The following account of Philippine mortality leans heavily on May, Batangas, and De Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse. On public health during the war, see also Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Philippine Culture, ed. Vicente L. Rafael (Philadelphia, 1995), 51–82, and Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC, 2006).
“Everything that could”: Taft, Recollections, 253.
Aguinaldo contracted malaria: Aguinaldo, Second Look at America, 107; Simeon A. Vilal Diary, Rare Books, NLP.
only the cheapest food … infant mortality rate: De Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse, 61, 140.
killed one-sixth of the population: Storey and Lichauco, Conquest, 121. The historian Resil Mojares estimates that one-sixth of the population of Cebu died as well—a hundred thousand deaths from war, including disease, between the years 1898 and 1906. War Against the Americans, 135.
The most careful study: De Bevoise, Agents of the Apocalypse, 13.
“Of course, we do want”: Twain, “Review of Edwin Wildman’s Biography of Aguinaldo,” 1901–1902, in Zwick, Twain’s Weapons, 103.
claimed more lives than the Civil War: This is true even when the fatalities of soldiers in the Civil War, around 620,000, are combined with the uncounted death toll of civilians, estimated at 50,000. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), xi–xii.
“fourth and final,” etc.: “It Must Be Over Now,” Washington Post, May 6, 1902, discussed in Kramer, Blood of Government, 155.
this time even farther south: Hostilities continued in the north, too, though there is debate about whether to classify them as war or crime. See, for example, Orlino A. Ochosa, Bandoleros: Outlawed Guerrillas of the Philippine-American War, 1903–1907 (Quezon City, 1995).
“Moroland”: An extraordinarily useful account of the Moroland war is Peter Gordon Gowing, Mandate in Moroland: The American Government of Muslim Filipinos, 1899–1920 (Quezon City, 1977). I also rely on Frank E. Vandiver, Black Jack: The Life and Times of John J. Pershing, vol. 1 (College Station, TX, 1977); Robert A. Fulton, Moroland: The History of Uncle Sam and the Moros, 1899–1920 (Bend, OR, 2009); essays by Joshua Gedacht and Patricio N. Abinales in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano (Madison, WI, 2009); and Arnold, Moro War.
“Slaves are a part”: Gowing, Mandate, 56. On this issue, see Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley, CA, 2001).
“rough guy,” etc.: Donald Trump, February 29, 2016, campaign rally, North Charleston, South Carolina.
“I have never tasted”: John J. Pershing, My Life Before the World War, 1860–1917, ed. John T. Greenwood (Lexington, KY, 2013), 152.
“strong personal friends”: Donald Smythe, Guerrilla Warrior: The Early Life of John J. Pershing (New York, 1973), 84.
without an interpreter: Pershing, My Life, 189.
elected a datu … honorary father: Vandiver, Black Jack, chap. 9.
909 more senior officers: The figure of 862 is commonly reported, but see ibid., 390n88.
“intolerant”: Rexford Guy Tugwell, The Stricken Land: The Story of Puerto Rico (Garden City, NY, 1946), 414.
“a new order of things”: Hermann Hagedorn, Leonard Wood: A Biography (New York, 1931), 2:8.
“One clean-cut lesson”: Wood to Roosevelt, August 3, 1903, in Gowing, Mandate, 156.
“like dominoes”: Brian McAllister Linn, Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 39.
six hundred Moros had died: For contemporary estimates, which ranged as high as fifteen hundred, see Fulton, Moroland, 339. The interpreters’ figure comes from the report of Major Omar Bundy, March 12, 1906, 8, Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, Document File 1890–1917, entry 25, NADC. I’m grateful to Joshua Gedacht for supplying this document.
“All the defenders”: Despite Wood’s pronouncement, some Moros survived, maybe up to one hundred. See Fulton, Moroland, 339, and Jack McCallum, Leonard Wood: Rough Rider, Surgeon, Architect of American Imperialism (New York, 2006), 229.
Bud Dajo dwarfed them all: There’s something both difficult and distasteful in comparing the size of massacres. The difficulty is that perpetrators rarely perform corpse censuses; the distasteful part is that comparing body counts can suggest that the lesser massacre was “less bad,” implying an uncomfortably glib moral mathematics wherein killing forty people is exactly half as wrong as killing eighty. Still, for what it’s worth, we think that Sand Creek (about 150), Wounded Knee (about 200), and Bloody Island (75–200) killed fewer people combined than Bud Dajo. Bloody Island, however, is especially hard to count. Reports from those who were there vary wildly, with 75–200 a rough median, but with the extremes varying from 16 (the report of a Pomo chief) to more than 800 (a U.S. major who arrived on the scene two months after). Sand Creek: Report of the John Evans Study Committee (Evanston, IL, 2014), 7; Wounded Knee: Jerome A. Greene, American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (Norman, OK, 2014), 288; Bloody Island: Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven, CT, 2016), 131–33.
“We abolished them”: Twain, “Comments on the Moro Massacre,” 1906, in Zwick, Twain’s Weapons, 172.
“I would not want”: Fulton, Moroland, 370.
“most illuminating,” etc.: Du Bois to Moorfield Storey, in The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst, MA, 1973), 1:136.
“The fighting was” … “given a thrashing”: Pershing to “Frank,” June 19, 1913, folder 1, and Pershing to Leonard Wood, July 9, 1913, folder 3, box 371, Pershing Papers.
guessed he had killed: Pershing, My Life, 302. In his official report, Pershing estimated, based on “Moro sources,” that there had been “between three and five hundred” defending Bud Bagsak, though some Moros escaped during the fighting and it’s unclear if the 300–500 estimate includes them. Pershing, Report of Bud Bagsak Operations, October 15, 1913, folder 4, box 372, Pershing Papers.
Historians’ estimates: Smythe puts the death toll at “over 500” (Guerrilla Warrior, 200); Gowing at 300–500 (Mandate, 240); Fulton at 200–400 (Moroland, 449–50); Linn at more than 500 (Guardians, 41).
further battles: Arnold, Moro War, 240–41.
When U.S. troops landed: Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures and the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC, 2008), 55. More generally, see Emma Dávila-Cox, “Puerto Rico in the Hispanic–Cuban–American War: Re-assessing ‘the Picnic,’” in The Crisis of 1898: Colonial Redistribution and Nationalist Mobilization, ed. Angel Smith and Emma Dávila-Cox (London, 1999), 96–127.
Many Puerto Ricans believed: Go, American Empire, 81. See also Christina Duffy Ponsa, “When Statehood Was Autonomy,” in Reconsidering the Insular Cases: The Past and Future of American Empire, ed. Gerald L. Neuman and Tomiko Brown-Nagin (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 1–28.
“a prosperous and happy country”: Duffy Ponsa, “When Statehood Was Autonomy,” 25.
Albizu Campos: Prominent biographical accounts are Federico Ribes Tovar, Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican Revolutionary, trans. Anthony Rawlings (New York, 1971); Benjamín Torres, Marisa Rosado, and José Manuel Torres Santiago, eds., Imagen de Pedro Albizu Campos (San Juan, 1973); Luis Angel Ferrao, Pedro Albizu Campos y el nacionalismo puertorriqueño (San Juan, 1990); Marisa Rosado, Pedro Albizu Campos: Las llamas de la aurora, 2d ed. (Santo Domingo, 1998); Laura Meneses de Albizu Campos, Albizu Campos y la independencia de Puerto Rico (San Juan, 2007); and Nelson A. Denis, War Against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony (New York, 2015).
“the most friendly” … “delirious”: Richard Harding Davis, The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns (New York, 1898), 325, 350.
Albizu’s father: Ferrao, Albizu, 122.
“appeared to be”: Charles Horton Terry, paraphrased in Dante Di Lillo and Edgar K. Thompson, “Pedro Albizu Campos,” Report, February 19, 1936, Albizu FBI File, sec. 1.
stay after class: Bill O’Reilly, “The Apotheosis of Hate,” Palabras Neighbors 5, c. 1951, in Albizu FBI File, sec. 8.
arranged for a scholarship: Di Lillo and Thompson, Albizu Report, February 19, 1936, Albizu FBI File.
“Pete”: Laura Meneses de Albizu Campos, “Como conoci a Albizu Campos,” September 1957, folder 7, box 31, Reynolds Papers. On Albizu’s time at Harvard, see Rosado, Albizu, and Anthony de Jesús, “I Have Endeavored to Seize the Beautiful Opportunity for Learning Offered Here: Pedro Albizu Campos at Harvard a Century Ago,” Latino Studies 9 (2011): 473–85.
most interesting club: E. D. M., “International Clubs in German Universities,” Unity, June 13, 1912, 238.
China, Germany, etc.: Based on consultation of The Harvard Crimson in years between the club’s establishment in 1908 and the end of Albizu’s time in 1921.
Boston Symphony Orchestra: Barbara Tischler, “One Hundred Percent Americanism and Music in Boston During World War I,” American Music 4 (1986): 164–76.
Münsterberg: Jutta Spillman and Lothar Spillman, “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (1993): 322–38.
He’d spoken out: “Forum Upheld Military Camps,” Harvard Crimson, April 3, 1915.
International Polity Club: “Polity Club Changes Program,” Harvard Crimson, October 18, 1916. On Albizu’s membership, see “Polity Club Elects New Officers,” Harvard Crimson, June 2, 1915.
“When the Spanish-American,” etc.: Pedro Albizu Campos, “Porto Rico and the War,” Harvard Crimson, April 14, 1917.
“heel of Achilles”: Roosevelt to William Howard Taft, August 21, 1907, LTR, 5:762.
“sober up”: Emilio Aguinaldo with Vicente Albano Pacis, A Second Look at America (New York, 1957), 133.
The Outlook: “A Battle with Moros,” The Outlook, June 21, 1913.
“We were constantly reminded”: Jim English, “Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958,” The Historical Journal 49 (2006): 251.
“to gather together”: Address on Flag Day, June 14, 1916, in The Foreign Policy of President Wilson: Messages, Addresses and Papers, ed. James Brown Scott (New York, 1918), 176, 175.
The State Department stopped insisting: Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York, 1994), chaps. 7 and 11.
“outside the charmed circle”: Woodrow Wilson, First Annual Message, December 2, 1913, APP.
“sovereignty, jurisdiction”: Joint Resolution for the Recognition of the Independence of the People of Cuba, 1898, 30 Stat. 739.
“money can be borrowed” … “When people ask”: Louis A. Pérez Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 32.
“complete jurisdiction”: Quoted in Jana K. Lipman, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History Between Empire and Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 2009), 24.
Cuba was easily absorbed: Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens, GA, 1990), chaps. 4–5.
Afro-Cubans: See Alejandro de la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), chap. 2.
“all the rights”: Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, Convention for the Construction of a Ship Canal, November 18, 1903, 33 Stat. 2234.
“I have about the same”: Roosevelt to Joseph Bucklin Bishop, February 23, 1904, LTR, 4:734.
To ensure political: Barbara Salazar Torreon, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2016, Congressional Research Service Report R42738, 2016.
In his letter: Albizu, “Porto Rico and the War.”
twenty thousand Filipinos … “modern Moses”: Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 344–45.
“an inexcusable blunder”: Democratic Party Platform, June 25, 1912, APP.
“no longer to be,” etc.: Woodrow Wilson, First Annual Message, December 2, 1913, APP.
not empty speech: Wilson’s views and actions are helpfully discussed in Roy Watson Curry, “Woodrow Wilson and Philippine Policy,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 41 (1954): 435–52.
“a form of home rule” … “There is faith”: Albizu, “Porto Rico and the War.”
“conquered possessions”: Woodrow Wilson, A History of the American People (New York, 1902), 5:3.
“children” … “training”: Woodrow Wilson, “The Ideals of America,” Atlantic Monthly, December 1902, 731, 733.
“white men of the South,” etc.: Wilson, History, 5:38, 5:49, 5:78.
“the first southern scholar”: Frederick Jackson Turner, American Historical Review 8 (1903): 764.
couldn’t help but notice: See reviews by Francis Wayland Shepardson, George McLean Harper, and C. H. Van Tyne in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 14, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton, NJ, 1972).
“to protect”: Wilson, History, 5:62.
“the mere instinct”: Ibid., 5:58.
“It teaches history”: “It’s like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true” is how the quotation is usually given. But that version appeared in 1937, twenty-two years after the event, and there is not much evidence in favor of it. Griffith’s version, by contrast, was printed in the New York American on February 28, 1915. For a full and judicious account, see Mark E. Benbow, “Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing History with Lightning,’” Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era 9 (2010): 509–33.
most popular film: Leon F. Litwack, “The Birth of a Nation,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Ted Mico et al. (New York, 1995), 136.
recruiters used the film: The connections between Wilson and Birth are detailed in Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “Woodrow Wilson and The Birth of a Nation: American Democracy and International Relations,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 18 (2007): 689–718.
“liberation of all colonies”: Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York, 2007), 37.
“The day of conquest,” etc.: Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress on the Conditions of Peace, January 8, 1918, APP.
In China: Erez Manela, “Global Anti-Imperialism in the Age of Wilson,” in Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism, ed. Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton (Ithaca, NY, 2015), 145.
“conveyed the impression”: [Pedro Albizu Campos], editorial annotations on biographical writing about Albizu, folder 4, box 30, Reynolds Papers. The context and use of the first person in the handwritten version of the annotations establish that their author is Albizu.
“thirty or forty thousand”: Meneses de Albizu Campos, Albizu, 29.
getting to Wilson: Anti-imperialists’ campaign to catch Wilson’s attention in 1919 is chronicled in Manela, Wilsonian Moment. Manela’s extraordinary work supplies the narrative frame for this section and is one source for my accounts of Gandhi, Zaghlul, Thanh (Ho), and Mao. See also Emily S. Rosenberg, “World War I, Wilsonianism, and Challenges to U.S. Empire,” DH 38 (2014): 852–63.
“No people”: Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 71.
Nguyen Tat Thanh: William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh (New York, 2000), 58–60. See also Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919–1941 (Berkeley, CA, 2002).
Albizu got another shot: See Albizu’s autobiographical note in Wells Blanchard, Harvard College Class of 1916: Secretary’s Third Report (n.p., 1922) and the following Harvard Crimson articles: “Campos, 2L., for Peace Conference,” January 13, 1919; “Cosmopolitan Club Plans for ‘International Night,’ Feb. 21,” January 25, 1919; “Cosmopolitan Club Will Hold Dance,” February 25, 1919.
he identified as white: Albizu listed his race as “white” on his Selective Service questionnaire in World War II according to John M. Hansell, Report 100–47403, July 5, 1944, Albizu FBI File, sec. 3. Albizu never denied his nonwhite ancestry, he simply rejected the “one-drop” racial classification system.
his wife mistook: Meneses de Albizu Campos, “Como conoci.”
a humiliating episode: Described in Carl E. Stanford, Report 100–3906, May 26, 1943, Albizu FBI File, sec. 2. Andrea Friedman cautions against making too much of this incident in Citizenship in Cold War America: National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent (Amherst, MA, 2014), 145–46.
He arrived in Boston too late: Albizu in Blanchard, Harvard Class of 1916. Albizu’s reactions to his Southern journey are described in Ribes Tovar, Albizu, 20–21. An alternative account of Albizu’s radicalization, arguing that he was a nationalist from high school, is Juan Antonio Corretjer, Albizu Campos and the Ponce Massacre (New York, 1965), 9–12.
Jan Smuts: See Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2009), especially chap. 1.
“indisputable”: Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race and Equality: The Racial Equality Proposal of 1919 (London, 1998), 9.
“exploded with enthusiasm”: Sayyid Qutb, A Child from the Village, trans. John Calvert and William Shepard (1946; Syracuse, NY, 2005), 96.
“a bunch of robbers”: Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 195.
largest private fortunes: Calculations of wealth across history are difficult. Consulting with economists, Business Insider ranked Rockefeller and Carnegie the two richest humans of all time (Gus Lubin, “The 20 Richest People of All Time,” Business Insider, September 2, 2010, www
“It appears to me”: Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (Boston, 1888), 157–58.
“miles of broad streets,” etc.: Ibid., 52.
Burnham: The classic biographies are Charles Moore, Daniel H. Burnham: Architect, Planner of Cities (Boston, 1921), and Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner, rev. ed. (Chicago, 1979). On the connections between Bellamy and Burnham, see Mario Manieri-Elia, “Toward an ‘Imperial City’: Daniel H. Burnham and the City Beautiful Movement,” in The American City: From the Civil War to the New Deal, ed. Giorgio Cuicci et al., trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (1973; Cambridge, MA, 1979), 1–142.
“megalomania”: Louis H. Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (1924; New York, 1954), 288.
twenty-one million tickets: Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition and American Culture (Chicago, 1979), 131.
“They beheld”: Sullivan, Autobiography, 321.
“ablaze with pity”: Katherine Mayo, The Isles of Fear: The Truth About the Philippines (New York, 1925), 83. Mayo’s reference is to the Philippines in particular.
“Who but a mad dreamer”: Forbes Diary, 1:4, May 21, 1910.
“in the same way”: Manuel Quezon, quoted in Origins of the Philippine Republic: Extracts from the Diaries and Records of Francis Burton Harrison, ed. Michael P. Onorato (Ithaca, NY, 1974), 6.
favorite polo horses: Forbes Diary, 1:5, September 4, 1913.
Gee Strings: Ibid., 1:4, April 15, 1911.
“I remember”: Ibid., 1:3, March 27, 1909.
“they want it”: Ibid., 1:1, February 1, 1904.
“knew exactly”: Ibid., 1:1, 439n.
“believe in it”: Ibid., 1:3, July 18, 1910.
“ancient pest-hole”: Mayo, Isles of Fear, 84.
“It has the crookedest streets”: George A. Miller, Interesting Manila (Manila, 1906), 54.
“constant terror”: Helen Herron Taft, Recollections of Full Years (New York, 1914), 254, 256.
torching an entire district: Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines,” in Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Philippine Culture, ed. Vicente L. Rafael (Philadelphia, 1995), 51–82.
“Manila has before it”: D. H. Burnham, assisted by Peirce Anderson, “Report on the Improvement of Manila, P.I.,” June 28, 1905, 33, folder 7, box 57, ser. 5, Burnham Collection. On the relationship between Burnham’s plans and Manila’s decimation, see Estela Duque, “Militarization of the City,” Fabrications 19 (2009): 48–67.
“Because every section”: Burnham, “Improvement of Manila,” 19.
“world famous resort,” etc.: Ibid., 25.
“seems to meet”: Forbes Diary, 1:1, January 5, 1905.
“If one has capital”: Moore, Burnham, 1:73.
his Plan of Chicago: See William E. Parsons, “Burnham as Pioneer in City Planning,” Architectural Record 38 (1915): 13–31; Moore, Burnham; Hines, Burnham; and especially Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago, 2006). Details drawn from Smith’s book.
Chicago voters approved: Smith, Plan of Chicago, 133.
In the Philippines: On Burnham and colonial architecture, see, besides the biographies, Thomas S. Hines, “Daniel H. Burnham and American Architectural Planning in the Philippines,” Pacific History Review 41 (1972): 33–53; Robert R. Reed, City of Pines: The Origins of Baguio as a Colonial Hill Station and Regional Capital (Berkeley, CA, 1976); Winand Klassen, Architecture in the Philippines: Filipino Building in a Cross-Cultural Context (Cebu City, 1986), chap. 5; David Brody, “Building Empire: Architecture and American Imperialism in the Philippines,” Journal of Asian American Studies 4 (2001): 123–45; Gerard Lico, Arkitekturang Filipino: A History of Architecture and Urbanism in the Philippines (Quezon City, 2008), chap. 5; Christopher Vernon, “Daniel Hudson Burnham and the American City Imperial,” Thesis Eleven 123 (2014): 80–105; and Rebecca Tinio McKenna, American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines (Chicago, 2017).
No living Filipino: The one Filipino name that appears in Burnham’s Manila plan is that of “Dr. Razal [sic],” i.e., the late Jose Rizal, mentioned (once, glancingly) in Burnham’s one-paragraph history of Manila from 1571 to the onset of U.S. rule. Thanks to Margaret Garb for pointing out Burnham’s isolation from Filipinos.
Three days after: A. N. Rebori, “The Work of William E. Parsons in the Philippine Islands,” Architectural Record 40 (1917): 433.
“we so fixed it”: Forbes Diary, 1:1, 392n.
“charged with”: William E. Parsons, Annual Report of the Consulting Architect, November 17, 1905, to June 30, 1906, 2, folder 9, box 57, ser. 5, Burnham Collection.
Parsons: See Rebori, “Parsons”; Thomas S. Hines, “American Modernism in the Philippines: The Forgotten Architecture of William E. Parsons,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 32 (1973), 316–26; Michelangelo E. Dakudao, “The Imperial Consulting Architect: William E. Parsons (1872–1939),” Bulletin of the American Historical Collection 12 (1994): 7–43; and Lico, Arkitekturang Filipino, chap. 5.
“architect’s dream”: Parsons, quoted in Forbes Diary, 1:1, March 12, 1906.
“large and rapidly increasing”: Parsons, 1906 Annual Report, 10.
he standardized: Ibid.; Rebori, “Parsons,” 433; and Lico, Arkitekturang Filipino, 262–72.
howls of protest: Ralph Harrington Doane, “The Story of American Architecture in the Philippines,” Architectural Review 8 (1919): 121.
“I doubt if this method”: Rebori, “Parsons,” 433.
“the Burnham plan is sacred”: Quoted in Hines, “Burnham in the Philippines,” 51.
“more deeply interested” … “to formulate my plans”: “Plan Queen City for the Far East,” Chicago Tribune, September 18, 1904.
“Stood trip well” … “How is the horse?”: Pershing, My Life Before the World War, 253.
four thousand men: Reed, City of Pines, 109.
“The Filipinos so far”: Forbes Diary, 1:1, September 17, 1904.
Devil’s Slide: W. Cameron Forbes, Notes on Early History of Baguio (Manila, 1933), 32.
“Few days pass”: Forbes Diary, 1:1, September 17, 1904. On the road, see Greg Bankoff, “‘These Brothers of Ours’: Poblete’s Obreros and the Road to Baguio 1903–1905,” Journal of Social History 38 (2005): 1047–72, and McKenna, American Imperial Pastoral, chap. 2.
“gives the red corpuscles”: Forbes Diary, 1:1, January 1, 1905.
could not own land: One land seizure in Baguio was challenged and eventually overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes chided that colonialism in the Philippines should not proceed “like the settlement of the white race in the United States.” Its purpose should be “to do justice to the natives, not to exploit their country for private gain.” Carino v. Insular Government, 212 U.S. 449, 458 (1909). The story is in McKenna, American Imperial Pastoral, chap. 3.
“could be made equal”: D. H. Burnham, “Preliminary Plan of Baguio Province of Benguet, P.I.,” June 27, 1905, 2, folder 3, box 56, ser. 5, Burnham Collection.
“unusual monumental possibilities”: D. H. Burnham, “Report on the Proposed Plan of the City of Baguio, Province of Benguet, P.I.,” October 3, 1905, 2, in folder 4, box 56, ser. 5, Burnham Collection.
“frankly dominate”: Burnham, “Preliminary Plan of Baguio,” 1.
“equal to the finest”: Forbes’s Prospectus of the Baguio Country Club, quoted in Virginia Benitez Licuanan, Filipinos and Americans: A Love-Hate Relationship (Baguio, 1982), 71.
“monumental buildings where”: Burnham, “Proposed Plan of Baguio,” 6.
“blessed relief” … “the swarm”: Forbes Diary, 1:5, March 9, 1913.
“every three days”: Ibid., 1:3, May 14, 1908.
6 were Filipino: Licuanan, Filipinos and Americans, 91.
“I get up leisurely,” etc.: Forbes Diary, 1:5, March 9, 1913.
“I have let”: Ibid., 1:3, May 14, 1908.
triumph of modern engineering: S. R. Afable, “Most Progressive City,” in J. C. Orendain, Philippine Wonderland (Baguio, 1940), 35–40.
“admire the audacity”: “America in the Philippines, Part VII,” London Times, December 1, 1910.
“Stingy towards”: La Vanguardia, June 20, 1912, quoted in Reed, City of Pines, 108.
one in four … one in twenty: Cristina Evangelista Torres, The Americanization of Manila, 1898–1921 (Quezon City, 2010), 43.
“It is impossible”: Hines, “Modernism in the Philippines,” 325.
“nailed down”: Parsons, “Burnham as Pioneer,” 24.
Juan Arellano: Surprisingly few accounts of Arellano’s life and career exist. The best are I. V. Mallari, “Architects and Architecture in the Philippines,” Philippine Magazine, August 1930, 156–57, 186–94; Ernesto T. Bitong, “Portrait of an Architect in Retirement,” Sunday Times Magazine (Manila), June 16, 1957, 3–6; Dominador Castañeda, Art in the Philippines (Quezon City, 1964), 94–95; Klassen, Architecture in the Philippines, chap. 5; and Lico, Arkitekturang Filipino, chap. 5.
it didn’t win: Report of the Philippine Exposition Board to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (St. Louis, 1904), 87.
Jamestown Exposition: Bitong, “Portrait of an Architect.”
disqualified: Castañeda, Art in the Philippines, 94.
Olmsted: Mallari, “Architects and Architecture,” 190.
“the most magnificent”: A.V.H. Hartendorp, “The Legislative Building,” Philippine Education Magazine, October 1926, quoted in Rodrigo D. Perez III, Arkitektura: An Essay on the American Colonial and Contemporary Traditions in Philippine Architecture (Manila, 1994), 5.
“Here is a stronger”: “Designed by Filipino Brains, and Built by Filipino Hands,” The Philippine Republic, February 1927, 5.
he later regretted: Arellano’s striking repudiation of the “Occidental influence” is articulated in “Fine and Applied Arts in the Philippines: An Interview with Juan M. Arellano,” Philippines Herald Year Book, September 29, 1934, 53, 58, 62.
“architecturally, the landmark”: Nick Joaquin, Almanac for Manileños (Manila, 1979), 213, 214. Later, Arellano would adopt other styles, notably Art Deco.
“greatest architectural success”: Hines, “Burnham in the Philippines,” 50.
“a picnic”: Richard Harding Davis, The Cuban and Porto Rican Campaigns (New York, 1898), 299–300.
“hordes of pallid refugees”: Bailey K. Ashford, A Soldier in Science: The Autobiography of Bailey K. Ashford (New York, 1934), 3. My account of Ashford relies also on Bailey K. Ashford and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez, “Summary of a Ten Years’ Campaign Against Hookworm Disease in Porto Rico,” Journal of the American Medical Association 54 (1910): 1757–61; Bailey K. Ashford and Pedro Gutiérrez Igaravídez, Uncinariasis (Hookworm Disease) in Porto Rico: A Medical and Economic Problem (Washington, DC, 1911); Warwick Anderson, “Going Through the Motions: American Public Health and Colonial ‘Mimicry,’” American Literary History 14 (2002): 686–719; Nicole Trujillo-Pagan, Modern Colonization by Medical Intervention: U.S. Medicine in Puerto Rico (Leiden, Netherlands, 2013); and especially José Amador, Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890–1940 (Nashville, 2015), chap. 3.
Wood’s attention: Ashford, Soldier in Science, 17–18.
came to see himself: In ibid., Ashford calls Puerto Rico “home” (325), describes himself as a “Puerto Rican” (412), and speaks critically of “our northern brothers” on the mainland (332).
“flabby flesh”: Ibid., 41.
“It was unthinkable”: Ibid., 42.
“oval thing”: Ibid., 4.
“like a veil”: Ibid., 43.
nine in ten rural: “Report of the Porto Rico Anemia Commission,” 1904, in Ashford and Gutiérrez, Uncinariasis, 136.
long tunnel: Steven Palmer, “Migrant Clinics and Hookworm Science: Peripheral Origins of International Health, 1840–1920,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83 (2009): 688–90.
two-thirds of Puerto Ricans: José G. Amador, “‘Redeeming the Tropics’: Public Health and National Identity in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil, 1890–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2008), 119.
leading cause: “Report of the Porto Rico Anemia Commission,” 1904, in Ashford and Gutiérrez, Uncinariasis, 127–28.
“carrying a bottle”: Ashford, Soldier in Science, 45.
nearly 30 percent: Ashford and Gutiérrez, Uncinariasis, 35. The two were joined in their work by three other physicians: Walter W. King and, later, Isaac González Martínez and Francisco Sein y Sein.
“What on earth,” etc.: Story recounted (by Stiles) in Mark Sullivan, Our Times: The United States, 1900–1925 (New York, 1930), 3:319–20. See also Burton J. Hendrick, The Training of an American: The Earlier Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, 1855–1913 (Boston, 1928), 370–71.
give a million dollars: My account of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission is from John Ettling, The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge, MA, 1981).
local sheriff: Charles Wardell Stiles, “Early History, in Part Esoteric, of the Hookworm (Uncinariasis) Campaign in Our Southern United States,” Journal of Parasitology 25 (1939): 298.
Tampa newspaper: Sullivan, Our Times, 328.
“Six thousand years ago”: Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth (New York, 1962), 33.
were as prideful: Ashford and Gutiérrez, Uncinariasis, 30–31.
Southern tent revival: Discussed with great clarity in Ettling, Germ of Laziness, chaps. 6–7.
“preach the gospel”: “Second Report of the Porto Rico Anemia Commission,” 1906, in Ashford and Gutiérrez, Uncinariasis, 170.
“utterly inadequate”: Ashford and Gutiérrez, Uncinariasis, 19.
“sanitary ordinance” … “energetically enforced” … “liberty”: “Third Report of the Porto Rico Anemia Commission,” 1907, in ibid., 213, 214.
campaign fizzled: Ashford, Soldier in Science, 71–72, 87–88. On the mainland versus colonial hookworm campaigns, see Anderson, “Going Through the Motions,” 701–702.
enduring economic effects: Hoyt Bleakley, “Disease and Development: Evidence from Hookworm Eradication in the American South,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122 (2007): 73–117.
first global health campaign: John Farley, To Cast Out Disease: A History of the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, 1913–1951 (New York, 2004); Steven Palmer, Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation (Ann Arbor, MI, 2010).
headed off the direst: Ashford and Gutiérrez, Uncinariasis, 21–22.
afflicted eight or nine in ten: Arnold Dana, Porto Rico’s Case, Outcome of American Sovereignty (New Haven, CT, 1928), 39; Lawrence D. Granger, “A Study of the Rural Social Problems in Porto Rico” (M.A. thesis, University of Southern California, 1930), 62–63; and Farley, Cast Out Disease, chap. 5.
killed hundreds, etc.: Thomas Mathews, Puerto Rican Politics and the New Deal (Gainesville, FL, 1960), chap. 1.
sugar prices and wages: Emilio Pantojas-Garcia, “Puerto Rican Populism Revisited: The PPD During the 1940s,” Journal of Latin American Studies 21 (1989): 523.
Incomes in Puerto Rico: James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 139.
“among the lower”: James R. Beverley, quoted in Annette B. Ramírez de Arellano and Conrad Seipp, Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983), 186n56.
“only solution,” etc.: “Top Secret” annex to memorandum by Charles W. Taussig, March 15, 1945, quoted in William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire (New York, 1978), 486–87n.
hoped that experimental treatments: Farley, Cast Out Disease, chap. 5.
“outspoken” … “hawk-like”: “Cancer Fighter, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads,” NYT, October 10, 1956.
“A man of brusque manners”: Luis Baldoni, Testimony in Cornelius Rhoads Case, 1932, 1, folder 4, box 31, Reynolds Papers.
“nervous half-hour visits”: Ashford, Soldier in Science, 44.
refused treatment: C. P. Rhoads et al., “Observations on the Etiology and Treatment of Anemia Associated with Hookworm Infection in Puerto Rico,” Medicine 13 (1934): 353, 361.
“experimental ‘animals’” … “If they don’t”: Susan E. Lederer, “‘Porto Ricochet’: Joking About Germs, Cancer, and Race Extermination in the 1930s,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 725.
Dear Ferdie: Full letter reprinted in Truman R. Clark, Puerto Rico and the United States, 1917–1933 (Pittsburgh, 1975), 152–53.
Clandestine villainy: The most thorough accounts are Lederer, “Porto Ricochet,” and Pedro Aponte Vázquez, The Unsolved Case of Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads: An Indictment (San Juan, 2004). For the view from the Rockefeller Institute, see Farley, Cast Out Disease, chap. 5.
“in a moment” … “I have a high notion” … “loan”: Baldoni, Testimony, 5, 8.
gave it to a man: “Patients Say Rhoads Saved Their Lives,” NYT, February 2, 1932.
cover letter: Lederer, “Porto Ricochet,” 726.
“confession of murder”: Douglas Starr, “Revisiting a 1930s Scandal, AACR to Rename a Prize,” Science 300 (2003): 574.
“even worse”: James R. Beverley to Wilber A. Sawyer, February 17, 1932, reprinted in Aponte Vázquez, Unsolved Case, 35–36.
“a mental case”: Lederer, “Porto Ricochet,” 734.
Katz: Starr, “Revisiting a Scandal,” 573.
“Where tyranny”: Juan Manuel Carrión et al., eds., La nación puertorriqueña: Ensayos en torno a Pedro Albizu Campos (San Juan, 1997), 234.
four sticks of dynamite: Mathews, Puerto Rican Politics, 103.
Riggs wrote to: E. Francis Riggs to Millard Tydings, January 3, 1934, and January 8, 1934, “Commission on Territories and Insular Affairs, 1933–December 10, 1934” folder, box 1, ser. 4, Tydings Papers.
“Public order”: A. W. Maldonado, Luis Muñoz Marín: Puerto Rico’s Democratic Revolution (San Juan, 2006), 132.
exploded on holidays: Dante Di Lillo and Edgar K. Thompson, “Pedro Albizu Campos,” supplementary report, February 26, 1936, 3, Albizu FBI File, sec. 1.
“Some night”: Dante Di Lillo, “Pedro Albizu Campos,” report, April 4, 1936, 32, Albizu FBI File, sec. 1.
“non-stop war”: La Democracia, October 26, 1935, discussed in Luis A. Ferrao, “29 Lies (and More to Come) in the Fictitious War Against All Puerto Ricans,” Diálogo UPR, September 24, 2015, www.dialogoupr.com.
“There will be war”: Carl E. Stanford, report 100-3906, “Pedro Albizu Campos,” May 26, 1943, 5, Albizu FBI File, sec. 2.
shoot-out with the police: Juan Manuel Carrión, “The War of the Flags: Conflicting National Loyalties in a Modern Colonial Situation,” CENTRO Journal 28 (2006): 112.
“clean up”: “Zioncheck Offers to Clean Up Island,” NYT, May 14, 1936.
“the most important”: Ronald Fernandez, The Disenchanted Island: Puerto Rico and the United States in the Twentieth Century, 2d ed. (Westport, CT, 1996), 128.
hand-picked jury: Evidence presented by Rep. Vito Marcantonio in “Five Years of Tyranny in Puerto Rico,” Congressional Record, 76th Cong., 1st sess., appendix, 4062–69.
gunfire erupted: Details all from Arthur Garfield Hays, Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Civil Rights in Puerto Rico, May 22, 1937.
“common fact”: Edgar K. Thompson to Hoover, December 22, 1939, Albizu FBI File, sec. 2.
“massacre”: Hays, Report of Commission, 28.
“jocular letter”: “Porto Rico ‘Plot’ Fails at Hearing,” Washington Post, February 7, 1932.
Time printed the letter: “Porto Ricochet,” Time, February 15, 1932, 38. On public relations, see Lederer, “Porto Ricochet.”
didn’t impede him: A good overview of Rhoads’s career (though it omits Puerto Rico) is C. Chester Stock, “Cornelius Packard Rhoads, 1898–1959,” Cancer Research 20 (1960): 409–11.
Chemical Warfare Service ran tests: See Committee on the Survey of the Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite, Veterans at Risk: The Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite, ed. Constance M. Pechura and David P. Rall (Washington, DC, 1993), and Susan L. Smith, Toxic Exposures: Mustard Gas and the Health Consequences of World War II in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ, 2017).
race based: Susan L. Smith, “Mustard Gas and American Race-Based Human Experimentation in World War II,” Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 36 (2008): 517–21.
“from the Continental Limits”: William N. Porter to Commanding General, May 5, 1944; “200, San Jose Project” folder; box 56; Entry 2B, Misc. Series, 1942–45; CWS. This was part of a general War Department strategy of deploying Puerto Rican troops in the Caribbean to free up “continental” troops for combat, on which see Steven High, Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–1967 (New York, 2009), 39–41.
One GI: John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama (Durham, NC, 2003), 59.
“cheap availability,” etc.: Jay Katz to David Rall, June 16, 1992, in Veterans at Risk, 388, 389.
established medical testing stations: “Col. Rhoads Is Cited for Poison Gas Study,” NYT, May 6, 1945.
He arranged to transport: Rhoads to Jake T. Nolan, August 31, 1944; “200, Bushnell Project” folder; box 56; Entry 2B, Misc. Series, 1942–45; CWS.
recommended which gases: Cornelius P. Rhoads, “Estimates of the Extent of Ground Contamination Necessary for the Production of Casualties by Mustard Vapor Effects on Masked Troops in the Contaminated Area”; folder 470.6; box 154; Entry 4M, Subject Series, 1942–45; and Cornelius P. Rhoads, “The Assessment of Casualties Produced by WP and PWP,” September 19, 1944; folder 704; box 178; Entry 4B, Misc. Series, 1942–45; both in CWS.
offered comments: See, for example, Rhoads to John R. Wood, August 13, 1943; “400.112 Mustard Liquid” folder; box 151; Entry 4A, Subject Series, 1942–45; CWS.
“combating poison gas”: “Rhoads Cited for Gas Study.”
to treat lymphoma: On mustard agents and medical uses, see Cornelius P. Rhoads, “The Sword and the Ploughshare,” 1946, reprinted in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 28 (1978): 306–12; Alfred Gilman, “The Initial Clinical Trial of Nitrogen Mustard,” American Journal of Surgery 105 (1963): 574–78; Peggy Dillon, National Cancer Institute, Oral History Interview Project, Interview with Joseph Burchenal, January 26, 2001, history.nih.gov/archives/oral_histories; Vincent T. DeVita Jr. and Edward Chu, “A History of Cancer Chemotherapy,” Cancer Research 68 (2008): 8643–53; and especially Smith, Toxic Exposures, chap. 4.
divided the stock: Rhoads, “Sword and Ploughshare,” 312.
Rhoads also recruited: DeVita and Chu, “History of Chemotherapy,” 8646.
“frontal attack”: “Frontal Attack,” Time, June 27, 1949, 66.
intolerance for alternative approaches: Rhoads especially sidelined approaches championed by women. See Virginia Livingston-Wheeler and Edmond G. Addeo, The Conquest of Cancer: Vaccines and Diet (New York, 1984), 72–79, 84–88; Ralph W. Moss, The Cancer Industry: Unraveling the Politics (New York, 1989), 478; and Matthew Tontonoz, “Beyond Magic Bullets: Helen Coley Nauts and the Battle for Immunotherapy,” Cancer Research Institute Blog, April 1, 2015, www
“one of the most prominent”: Starr, “Revisiting a Scandal,” 573.
“It was just totally shocking”: Eric T. Rosenthal, “The Rhoads Not Given: The Tainting of the Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award,” Oncology Times, September 10, 2003, 20. See also ibid.
inescapable daily presence: On this, I have learned much from Alvita Akiboh and her article “Pocket-Sized Imperialism: U.S. Designs on Colonial Currency,” DH 41 (2017): 874–902.
coverage in The New York Times: New York Times Index: Annual Cumulative Volume Year 1930 (New York, 1931).
“brown Polynesian people,” etc.: Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928; New York, 2001), 8. Mead’s silence on the colonial aspects of her subject is discussed in Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, MA, 1983). Mead’s book contains only three instances of the term American Samoa (two of which are parenthetical), one colony (a classical reference, though), one navy, and no mentions of territory, empire, or imperialism.
didn’t know where the island was: Hubert Herring, “Rebellion in Puerto Rico,” The Nation, November 29, 1933, 618–19.
didn’t have a single federal official: That episode, in 1878–79, is described in A. P. Swineford, Alaska: Its History, Climate and Natural Resources (Chicago, 1898), 66.
“It has been impossible”: Moorfield Storey and Marcial P. Lichauco, The Conquest of the Philippines by the United States (New York, 1926), 203.
Anti-Imperialist League: Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York, 1968), 225. See also Jim Zwick, “The Anti-Imperialist League and the Origins of Filipino-American Oppositional Solidarity,” Amerasia Journal 24 (1998): 65–85.
Pan-American Freedom League: Robert David Johnson, Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 67.
“Not in all the years”: Oswald Garrison Villard, “Ernest Gruening’s Appointment,” The Nation, August 29, 1934, 232.
quite a career: Johnson, Gruening, and Robert David Johnson, “Anti-Imperialism and the Good Neighbour Policy: Ernest Gruening and Puerto Rican Affairs, 1934–1939,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29 (1997): 89–110.
spent only a single day: Ernest Gruening, Many Battles: The Autobiography of Ernest Gruening (New York, 1973), 181.
Roosevelt rattled off his assessments: Ibid., 181, and Ernest Gruening, The Battle for Alaska Statehood (Seattle, 1977), xi.
fantasizing about annexing: Lowell T. Young, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and America’s Islets: Acquisition of Territory in the Caribbean and the Pacific,” The Historian 35 (1973): 206.
falling by two-thirds: David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York, 1999), 77.
“infinitely more”: Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials: A Study of America in Peace and War (New York, 1938), 174.
bought more sugar: A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ, 2018), 517.
“two kinds of territory”: Gruening, Many Battles, 229.
colonies paid the cost: April Merleaux, Sugar and Civilization: American Empire and the Cultural Politics of Sweetness (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), chap. 7.
“reversal of opinion”: “Calvin Coolidge Says,” New York Herald-Tribune, May 25, 1931.
“It would be a mortifying spectacle”: “The Philippines and Economics,” Christian Science Monitor, July 20, 1931, 14.
comprehensive survey: Ten Eyck Associates, Philippine Independence: A Survey of the Present State of American Public Opinion on the Subject (New York, 1932), 31.
“surely never happen”: Quoted in Manuel V. Gallego, The Price of Philippine Independence Under the Tydings McDuffie Act: An Anti-View of the So-Called Independence Law (Manila, 1939), 85.
Quezon was a master politician: On Quezon’s career, see Carlos Quirino, Quezon: Paladin of Philippine Freedom (Manila, 1971), chaps. 3–5; Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI, 2009), 187–88.
“wonderfully trained”: McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, 188.
mercury with a fork: John Gunther, Inside Asia, war ed. (1939; New York, 1942), 316.
about four-fifths: O. D. Corpuz, An Economic History of the Philippines (Quezon City, 1997), 243.
privately assuring his contacts: Herbert Hoover, Memoirs (New York, 1952), 2:361; Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929–1946 (New Haven, CT, 1965), chap. 1; and Michael Paul Onorato, “Quezon and Independence: A Reexamination,” Philippine Studies 37 (1989): 221–31.
ratified this version: The best guide to this complicated episode is Friend, Between Two Empires, part 3.
governor-general predicted: Theodore Friend, The Blue-Eyed Enemy: Japan Against the West in Java and Luzon, 1942–1945 (Princeton, NJ, 1988), 33.
“considered to be”: Philippine Independence Act, March 24, 1934, 48 Stat. 462.
Quezon arranged a ceremony: Chronicled in Francis Burton Harrison, Origins of the Philippine Republic: Extracts from the Diaries and Records of Francis Burton Harrison, ed. Michael P. Onorato (Ithaca, NY, 1974), 17–18.
“By his silence”: Gruening, Many Battles, 197.
“revenge disguised as political freedom”: Luis Muñoz Marín, Memorias: Autobiografía pública, 1898–1940 (San Juan, 1982), 1:149.
95 percent of Puerto Rico’s off-island sales: James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 120.
“As a matter of cold actuality”: Theodore Roosevelt Jr. to Quezon, quoted in Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Colonial Policies of the United States (Garden City, NY, 1937), 187.
reverse Philippine independence: Gerald E. Wheeler, “The Movement to Reverse Philippine Independence,” Pacific History Review 33 (1964): 167–81.
“realistic reexamination” … “If our flag”: Paul V. McNutt, radio address, March 14, 1938, “Commonwealth (Administration) Philippines” folder, box 2, Padover File.
“presentation of the facts”: “Quezon Proves to be Irresponsible!” Philippine-American Advocate, 1938, clipping in “Independence—Philippines” folder, box 4, Padover File.
“wholehearted and unswerving loyalty”: Quezon, Loyalty Day Declaration, 1941, in World War II and the Japanese Occupation, ed. Ricardo Trota Jose (Quezon City, 2006), 14.
one-peso commemorative coin: Thanks to Alvita Akiboh for drawing this to my attention.
Britain annexing the Philippines: R. John Pritchard, “President Quezon and Incorporation of the Philippines into the British Empire, 1935–1937,” Bulletin of the American Historical Collection 12 (1984): 42–63.
“as if he had a flagpole”: John Hersey, Men on Bataan (New York, 1942), 279.
sexual failure: Michael Schaller, Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General (New York, 1989), 11.
a military genius: The MacArthur literature is extensive. I’ve relied mainly on Rem.; D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur, vol. 1 (Boston, 1970); William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (Boston, 1978); Carol Morris Petillo, Douglas MacArthur: The Philippine Years (Bloomington, IN, 1981); Schaller, MacArthur; and Richard Connaughton, MacArthur and Defeat in the Philippines (Woodstock, NY, 2001).
“desperadoes”: Rem., 29. MacArthur describes Guimaras as “infested with brigands and guerrillas” but does not say which the men he slew were.
Plan Orange: Earl S. Pomeroy, Pacific Outpost: American Strategy in Guam and Micronesia (Stanford, CA, 1951); Louis Morton, “Germany First: The Basic Concept of Allied Strategy in World War II,” in Command Decisions, ed. Kent Roberts Greenfield (Washington, DC, 1960), 11–47; Stetson Conn, Rose C. Engelman, and Byron Fairchild, Guarding the United States and Its Outposts (Washington, DC, 1961); Louis Morton, The War in the Pacific: Strategy and Command: The First Two Years (Washington, DC, 1962); Timothy P. Maga, “Democracy and Defence: The Case of Guam, U.S.A., 1918–1941,” Journal of Pacific History 20 (1985): 156–72; Edward S. Miller, War Plan Orange: The U.S. Strategy to Defeat Japan, 1897–1945 (Annapolis, MD, 1991); John Costello, Days of Infamy: MacArthur, Roosevelt, Churchill—The Shocking Truth Revealed (New York, 1994); Brian McAllister Linn, Guardians of Empire: The U.S. Army and the Pacific, 1902–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997); and Galen Roger Perras, Stepping Stones to Nowhere: The Aleutian Islands, Alaska, and American Military Strategy, 1867–1945 (Vancouver, 2003).
“not within the wildest”: Richard H. Rovere and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The MacArthur Controversy and American Foreign Policy (1951; New York, 1965), 44.
“literally an act of madness”: Morton, War in the Pacific, 34.
“both the Philippines and Hawaii”: Linn, Guardians, 147.
Public opinion polls: Pomeroy, Pacific Outpost, 140.
Fortune in 1940: “Fortune Magazine Survey XXVI,” “Fortune Magazine Survey” folder, box 1, Hawaii Equal Rights Commission Records, COM16, HSA.
protested vigorously: John Snell to Fortune, January 27, 1940, along with other letters in ibid.
war planners: Linn, Guardians, chaps. 4 and 6.
“Sakdal rebellion”: Motoe Terami-Wada, Sakdalistas’ Struggle for Philippine Independence, 1930–1945 (Quezon City, 2014), 4.
killing fifty-nine rebels: Ibid.
court-martial: Linn, Guardians, 148.
“an eleventh-hour struggle”: Rem., 109. MacArthur’s appointment as chief of staff ended, to his annoyance, while he was en route to the Pacific.
“just another job” … “hopeless venture”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (Garden City, NY, 1967), 222, 225.
worried that armed Filipinos: Ricardo Trota Jose, The Philippine Army, 1935–1942 (Manila, 1992), 64.
“basic appreciation”: Daniel D. Holt and James W. Leyerzapf, eds., Eisenhower: The Prewar Diaries and Selected Papers, 1905–1941 (Baltimore, 1998), 307.
birthday card: James, Years of MacArthur, 1:564.
“General, you have been”: As recounted by Eisenhower to Peter Lyon, reported in Lyon’s Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero (Boston, 1974), 78.
special uniform: Rovere and Schlesinger, MacArthur Controversy, 42.
$50 per Filipino trainee: James, Years of MacArthur, 1:608.
“an integral part” … “entirely inadequate”: MacArthur to Quezon, October 1940, reprinted in ibid., 1:541–42.
“to the width”: Joseph Driscoll, War Discovers Alaska (Philadelphia, 1943), 20.
“negligible”: Henry Stimson, quoted in Kenneth S. Coates and William R. Morrison, The Alaska Highway in World War II: The U.S. Army of Occupation in Canada’s Northwest (Norman, OK, 1992), 26.
Alaska had an air force: Brian Garfield, The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians (Garden City, NY, 1969), 64.
“in little more”: Harry W. Woodring, quoted in Perras, Stepping Stones, 21.
“‘We’re not going to waste’”: Gruening, Many Battles, 295.
B-17 bombers: Costello, Days of Infamy, chap. 2. A good assessment of the War Department’s provisioning of MacArthur is Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines (Washington, DC, 1953), chap. 3.
“the decisive element”: Quoted in William H. Bartsch, December 8, 1941: MacArthur’s Pearl Harbor (College Station, TX, 2003), 98.
other priorities: Linn, Guardians, 217.
“More speed!”: “Speed! Congress! Speed!” Paradise of the Pacific, February 1939, 32.
Hawai‘i’s defenses: Linn, Guardians, 217.
“absolutely indefensible”: Lewis H. Brereton, The Brereton Diaries: The War in the Air in the Pacific, Middle East, and Europe, 3 October 1941–8 May 1945 (New York, 1946), 17.
past tense: Timothy P. Maga, Defending Paradise: The United States and Guam, 1898–1950 (New York, 1988), 164.
“By no stretch”: Perras, Stepping Stones, 53.
U.S. Army contingent: On troop sizes, Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 49, 27.
canvas shoes: Glen M. Williford, Racing the Sunrise: Reinforcing America’s Pacific Outposts, 1941–1942 (Annapolis, MD, 2010), 102.
helmets: Holt and Leyerzapf, Eisenhower Diaries, 405.
artillery: Connaughton, MacArthur, 155.
never even fired their rifles: Rigoberto J. Atienza, A Time for War: 105 Days in Bataan ([Philippines], 1985), 10; Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 28.
growing air force: Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 39, 42.
“the Philippines could be defended”: “Destiny’s Child,” Time, December 29, 1941, 16.
“glaring deficiencies” … “unprepared”: High Commissioner’s Office to FDR, November 30, 1941, “Civilian Defense” folder, box 1, HC–Pol/Econ.
“God’s way”: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Comedy Central, August 12, 2008. The joke is often misattributed to Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain. Various incarnations can be found dating to the nineteenth century, but not by Bierce or Twain.
build a road: See Philip Paneth, Alaskan Backdoor to Japan (London, 1943); David A. Remley, Crooked Road: The Story of the Alaska Highway (New York, 1976); Kenneth S. Coates, ed., The Alaska Highway: Papers of the 40th Anniversary Symposium (Vancouver, 1985); Kenneth S. Coates and William R. Morrison, The Alaska Highway in World War II: The U.S. Army of Occupation in Canada’s Northwest (Norman, OK, 1992); and John Virtue, The Black Soldiers Who Built the Alaska Highway: A History of Four U.S. Army Regiments in the North, 1942–1943 (Jefferson, NC, 2013).
11,150 troops: Coates and Morrison, Alaska Highway in World War II, 47.
heavy equipment: Ibid., 41.
An anthropologist: Julie Cruikshank, “The Gravel Magnet: Some Social Impacts of the Alaska Highway on Yukon Indians,” in Coates, ed., Alaska Highway, 182.
“greatest piece of roadmaking”: Malcolm MacDonald, quoted in Virtue, Black Soldiers, 160.
the men abandoned them: Remley, Crooked Road, 60.
$1.2 billion: César J. Ayala and José L. Bolivar, Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War (Princeton, NJ, 2011), 25.
number of restaurants: “Honolulu … Island Boomtown,” Paradise of the Pacific, May 1944.
bank deposits: Gwenfread Allen, Hawaii’s War Years, 1941–1945 (Honolulu, 1950), 284.
Eight parlors … The overcrowded brothels: Beth Bailey and David Farber, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii (Baltimore, 1992), 105, 103.
new governmental intrusions: Discussed cogently in James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York, 2011). Sparrow’s book, from which this chapter takes its title and inspiration, deals exclusively with the mainland.
turned over all effective power: On wartime Hawai‘i, see Allen, Hawaii’s War Years; J. Garner Anthony, Hawaii Under Army Rule (Palo Alto, CA, 1955); and Bailey and Farber, First Strange Place. The definitive account of martial law is Harry N. Scheiber and Jane L. Scheiber, Bayonets in Paradise: Martial Law in Hawai‘i During World War II (Honolulu, 2016).
third of O‘ahu: Allen, Hawaii’s War Years, 221.
University of Hawaii graduates: Louise Stevens, “A Gas Mask Graduation Class,” Paradise of the Pacific, August 1942.
“enemy country”: Frank Knox to FDR, quoted in Scheiber and Scheiber, Bayonets, 135.
an uncomfortable moment: Allen, Hawaii’s War Years, 120.
“One Mighty God”: Scheiber and Scheiber, Bayonets, 86.
“hostility or disrespect”: Territory of Hawaii, Office of the Military Governor, General Orders 31 and 42, Uncatalogued Subject Files, box 8, HWRD.
General Orders read like: Territory of Hawaii, OMG, General Orders 129, 164, 167, 84, 88, respectively, in ibid.
“My authority”: Scheiber and Scheiber, Bayonets, 59.
“I’ve got a .45”: Jim A. Richstad, The Press Under Martial Law: The Hawaiian Experience (Lexington, KY, 1970), 13–14.
“known to be overzealous”: George Akita, diary excerpted in Hawaii Nikkei History Editorial Board, Japanese Eyes … American Heart: Personal Reflections of Hawaii’s World War II Nisei Soldiers (Honolulu, 1998), 40.
a single judge: “Taking Stock of Hawaii,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, April 6, 1942.
98.4 percent resulted: Anthony, Hawaii Under Army Rule, 27, 52.
They were tried for: Scheiber and Scheiber, Bayonets, 109.
keys in the ignition … playing cards: Territory of Hawaii, OMG, General Orders 113 and 134, HWRD.
One motorist: Drew Pearson, “Demand Cessation of Military Rule in Hawaii,” Washington Post, December 26, 1942.
One of the most disturbing: Important complicating factors: The defendant, Fred Spurlock, begged for mercy and got his sentence commuted to probation. But then Spurlock was arrested again, for getting into a fight. The Honolulu Provost Court, noting that Spurlock was on probation, sentenced him to five years’ hard labor on the spot. Spurlock wasn’t allowed to testify or call witnesses. The trial, according to him, lasted fewer than ten minutes. Ex Parte Spurlock, 66 F. Supp. 997 (D. Hawaii 1944).
sentences of more than: On sentencing, see Scheiber and Scheiber, Bayonets, 109–10. By March 1944, O‘ahu’s prison contained fewer than a hundred convicts, far short of the thousands who had been convicted in Honolulu’s provost court. Ernest May, “Hawaii’s Work in Wartime,” Honolulu Star Bulletin, May 18, 1944.
“American ‘conquered territory’”: Harold Ickes, quoted in Scheiber and Scheiber, Bayonets, 214.
“heterogeneous population”: Quoted in Duncan v. Kahanamoku, 327 U.S. 304, 333 (1946).
“Racism has no place”: Duncan, 327 U.S. at 334 (Murphy, J., concurring).
“Somebody ought”: Michael P. Onorato, ed., Origins of the Philippine Republic: Extracts from the Diaries and Records of Francis Burton Harrison (Ithaca, NY, 1974), 154.
Half of them died: The ordeal is detailed in Nick Golodoff, Attu Boy, ed. Rachel Mason (Anchorage, 2012).
brought relics from: Leocadio de Asis, From Bataan to Tokyo: Diary of a Filipino Student in Wartime Japan, 1943–1944, ed. Grant K. Goodman (Lawrence, KS, 1979), 65.
surprisingly light touch: Sam Lebovic, Free Speech and Unfree News: The Paradox of Press Freedom in America (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 118–25.
had his mail opened: Claus-M. Naske, Ernest Gruening: Alaska’s Greatest Governor (Fairbanks, 2004), 73.
“Are we foreigners”: Quoted in Joseph Driscoll, War Discovers Alaska (Philadelphia, 1943), 27.
“introduction of Gestapo methods”: Quoted in Robert David Johnson, Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 160.
catch-22: Naske, Gruening, 77.
“quietest war theater”: “Alaska Quietest War Theater—In Communiqués,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 12, 1942.
“hidden front”: William Gilman, Our Hidden Front (New York, 1944).
Aleut internment: My account relies primarily on Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (Washington, DC, 1982); Ryan Madden, “The Forgotten People: The Relocation and Internment of Aleuts During World War II,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 16 (1992): 55–76; Dean Kohlhoff, When the Wind Was a River: Aleut Evacuation in World War II (Seattle, 1995); and Russell W. Estlak, The Aleut Internments of World War II: Islanders Removed from Their Homes by Japan and the United States (Jefferson, NC, 2014).
“fundamental injustice”: Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 102 Stat. 904.
white residents of Unalaska: Madden, “Forgotten People,” 62.
“while eating”: Kohlhoff, Wind, 70.
“Feels funny”: Driscoll, War Discovers Alaska, 48.
“I have no language”: Kohlhoff, Wind, 116.
“no place for,” etc.: Personal Justice Denied, 339.
“As we entered,” etc.: Ibid., 340.
Pribilovians: Ryan Madden, “The Government’s Industry: Alaska Natives and Pribilof Sealing During World War II,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 91 (2000): 202–209.
MacArthur ordered police: “25,000 Japanese Interned,” Manila Tribune, December 9, 1941; Richard Connaughton, MacArthur and Defeat in the Philippines (Woodstock, NY, 2001), 189.
raided Japanese homes: John Hersey, Men on Bataan (New York, 1942), 35–36.
“People hooted”: Pacita Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy: A Diary of the Japanese Occupation (Pasig City, 1999), 3.
civilians hunted: Eliseo Quirino, A Day to Remember (Manila, 1958), 20.
Filipinos who helped: “Filipino Arrested for Hiding ‘Friend,’” Manila Tribune, December 12, 1941.
raped … ransacked: Maria Virginia Yap Morales, ed., Diary of the War: World War II Memoirs of Lt. Col. Anastacio Campo (Quezon City, 2006), 30, 43–46.
parked trucks: “Internees Cower as Sirens Sound,” Manila Daily Bulletin, December 29, 1941.
shooting prisoners: Hiroyuki Mizuguchi, Jungle of No Mercy: Memoir of a Japanese Soldier (Manila, 2010), 33–36. Further abuses are described in P. Scott Corbett, Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians Between the United States and Japan During the Second World War (Kent, OH, 1987), 50–52.
“the indescribable wave”: Kiyoshi Osawa, The Japanese Community in the Philippines Before, During, and After the War (Manila, 1994), 222.
swift and brutal revenge: Described in Marcial P. Lichauco, “Dear Mother Putnam”: A Diary of the War in the Philippines (Manila, c. 1949), 17. See also Hayase Shinzo, “The Japanese Residents of ‘Dabao-Kuo,’” in The Philippines Under Japan: Occupation Policy and Reaction, ed. Ikehata Setsuho and Ricardo Trota Jose (Quezon City, 1999), 247–87.
“Words cannot describe,” etc.: Osawa, Japanese Community, 162.
Hawai‘i’s war bond sales: William K. Hanifin, “Bond Sales,” April 30, 1946, folder 66, box 37, HWRD.
Alaska’s, as of: Naske, Gruening, 97.
“Up until then” … “did not know what resentment”: Ernest Gruening, Many Battles: The Autobiography of Ernest Gruening (New York, 1973), 210. On Alaskan segregation (which Gruening opposed vigorously), see Terrence M. Cole, “Jim Crow in Alaska: The Passage of the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945,” Western Historical Quarterly 23 (1992): 429–49.
might turn their guns: Muktuk Marston, Men of the Tundra: Eskimos at War (New York, 1969), 156.
“fellow citizens” … “eyes and ears”: Henry Varnum Poor, An Artist Sees Alaska (New York, 1945), 123.
“We will give”: Marston, Men of the Tundra, 58.
“Everywhere I found”: Gruening, introduction to Marston, Men of the Tundra, 4.
twenty thousand Alaska Natives: Captain Richard Neuberger, “Eskimo Guerrillas,” Saturday Evening Post, February 17, 1945, 6; Marston, Men of the Tundra, 156.
Pletnikoff: Ray Hudson, “Aleuts in Defense of Their Homeland,” in Alaska at War, 1941–1945: The Forgotten War Remembered, ed. Fern Chandonnet (Anchorage, 1995), 163.
fortifying Alaska’s north: Charles Hendricks, “The Eskimos and the Defense of Alaska,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 281.
enlisting at rates: Ibid., 292.
shocked to see armed men: C. F. Necrason, epilogue, Marston, Men of the Tundra, 179.
“guinea pigs”: Masayo Umezawa Duus, Unlikely Liberators: The Men of the 100th and the 442nd, trans. Peter Duus (1983; Honolulu, 1987), 113.
“We knew that we had to be”: Robert Asahina, Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad (New York, 2006), 35. The history of the 100th/442nd has been told often, with Asahina’s book one of the best renditions. A useful global perspective is T. Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans During World War II (Berkeley, CA, 2011), chap. 5.
Daniel Inouye: Story and quotations from Daniel K. Inouye, Journey to Washington (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1967), 150–54.
Medal of Honor: Medals for the 100th/442nd and army divisions counted from list at U.S. Army Center of Military History, history.army.mil/moh.
Pound for pound: On comparing decorations between units, see James M. McCaffrey, Going for Broke: Japanese American Soldiers in the War Against Nazi Germany (Norman, OK, 2013), 346–47.
near-simultaneous strike: On the attack, see especially Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines (Washington, DC, 1953); D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur, vol. 2 (Boston, 1975), chap. 1; John Costello, Days of Infamy: MacArthur, Roosevelt, Churchill—The Shocking Truth Revealed (New York, 1994); Richard Connaughton, MacArthur and Defeat in the Philippines (Woodstock, NY, 2001); and William H. Bartsch, December 8, 1941: MacArthur’s Pearl Harbor (College Station, TX, 2003).
“ace unit”: Douglas MacArthur, quoted in Bartsch, December 8, 193.
Thick fog: Costello, Days of Infamy, 20–21.
“The sight which,” etc.: Connaughton, MacArthur, 169.
“bewildering” … “and we shall”: William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (Boston, 1978), 206, 205. Manchester hypothesizes that MacArthur may have suffered “input overload.” John Costello, using notes from an unpublished 1942 interview with Lewis Brereton, MacArthur’s air commander, suggests a more damning possibility: MacArthur did meet with Brereton that morning (despite Brereton’s and MacArthur’s subsequent denials) and ordered Brereton not to strike back; MacArthur hoped to keep the Philippines neutral, and thus intact, in the coming war with Japan. Costello, Days of Infamy, 23. A more cautious account is James, Years of MacArthur, 2:3–15.
“We could see”: Costello, Days of Infamy, 34.
“one of the blackest”: Lewis H. Brereton, The Brereton Diaries: The War in the Air in the Pacific, Middle East, and Europe, 3 October 1941–8 May 1945 (New York, 1946), 44.
Now it was inoperable: Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 95–96.
“worst disaster”: Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (1950; Boston, 1985), 4:81.
North Luzon Force: James, Years of MacArthur, 2:45.
slab of oak: John Gunther, Inside Asia, war ed. (1939; New York, 1942), 309.
“a masterpiece”: Manchester, American Caesar, 218.
“It was hard to believe”: Fernando J. Mañalac, Manila: Memories of World War II (Quezon City, 1995), 10.
five bomb craters: “Ethel Herold’s Baguio War Memories,” Bulletin of the American Historical Collection 10 (1982): 12.
MacArthur’s three-year-old: Frances Bowes Sayre, Glad Adventure (New York, 1957), 232
dragon’s hoard: Ibid., 235; Steve Mellnik, Philippine Diary, 1939–1945 (New York, 1969), 116.
eighty thousand … twenty-six thousand: James, Years of MacArthur, 2:35.
The men ate half rations: Morton, Fall of the Philippines, 367–68.
horses, dogs, etc.: Ibid., 369–70.
“it looked like”: Connaughton, MacArthur, 273.
eating cigarettes: Rigoberto J. Atienza, A Time for War: 105 Days in Bataan (Philippines, 1985), 102.
“There are no atheists”: Carlos P. Romulo, I Saw the Fall of the Philippines (Garden City, NY, 1943), 263.
“I give to the people,” etc.: Roosevelt, Message of Support to the Philippines, December 28, 1941, APP.
“too much of the immediate,” etc.: Quoted in John Hersey, Men on Bataan (New York, 1942), 257.
“In our mind’s eyes”: Atienza, Time for War, 119.
“Our fight” … “Surrender”: Quoted in Romulo, Fall of the Philippines, 108.
menus from the Manila Hotel: Atienza, Time for War, 117.
“It was only the Americans”: William A. Owens, Eye-Deep in Hell: A Memoir of the Liberation of the Philippines, 1944–45 (Dallas, 1989), 102.
“It was bitter”: Roosevelt, State of the Union address, January 6, 1942, APP.
“I cannot stand,” etc.: Charles A. Willoughby and John Chamberlain, MacArthur: 1941–1951 (New York, 1954), 56.
“to erase”: Ibid.
“This war is not”: Quezon to Roosevelt, January 28, 1942, in World War II and the Japanese Occupation, ed. Ricardo Trota Jose (Quezon City, 2006), 79. Quezon describes the interchange in The Good Fight (New York, 1946), 259–74.
“While enjoying security”: Douglas MacArthur to George Marshall, February 8, 1942, FRUS 1942, 1:894.
Quezon demanded immediate independence: Ibid.
“the temper of the Filipinos”: Ibid., 1:896.
“You have no authority”: L. T. Gerow to Douglas MacArthur, February 11, 1942, FRUS 1942, 1:900.
“So long as the flag”: George Marshall to Douglas MacArthur, February 9, 1942, FRUS 1942, 1:898.
“Germany first” strategy: Louis Morton, “Germany First: The Basic Concept of Allied Strategy in World War II,” in Kent Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions (Washington, DC, 1959), 11–47.
“There are times”: Manchester, American Caesar, 241.
“Guess what I learned”: Mellnik, Philippine Diary, 116.
secret spot: John G. Hubbell, “The Great Manila Bay Silver Operation,” Reader’s Digest, April 1959, 123–34.
half a million dollars: Carol Morris Petillo, “Douglas MacArthur and Manuel Quezon: A Note on an Imperial Bond,” Pacific Historical Review 48 (1979): 110–17.
“We’re the battling bastards”: Jonathan Wainwright, General Wainwright’s Story (Garden City, NY, 1946), 54.
“The Americans, rulers and idols”: Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, A Question of Identity: Selected Essays (Manila, 1973), 202.
“gallantry and intrepidity”: James, Years of MacArthur, 2:132.
“All the people” … “I’ve never wanted”: Hersey, Men on Bataan, 4, 5.
bestseller list: www
highest directorial salary: Camilla Fojas, Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power (Austin, TX, 2014), 39. On Philippine World War II films, see Fojas, Islands of Empire, chap. 1, and Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron, Best Years: Going to the Movies, 1945–46 (New Brunswick, NJ, 2009), chap. 4.
466 towns and cities: Carlos P. Romulo, My Brother Americans (Garden City, NY, 1945), 21.
“Filamericans”: Romulo, Fall of the Philippines, 217–18.
“How I wished,” etc.: Carlos P. Romulo, Mother America: A Living Story of Democracy (Garden City, NY, 1943), 1.
“thirty-six thousand” … “trapped like rats”: They Were Expendable, dir. John Ford (MGM, 1945).
Filipinos served largely: A notable exception is Back to Bataan (1945), written and directed by two leftists later blacklisted for their politics. Though it focuses on a white colonel (John Wayne), it features numerous Filipino characters. However, the film was completed after the U.S. reconquest of the Philippines and so did nothing to stir up support for a military rescue.
His idea was to play: Michael P. Onorato, ed., Origins of the Philippine Republic: Extracts from the Diaries and Records of Francis Burton Harrison (Ithaca, NY, 1974), 203.
“shocked and horrified”: Frank S. Adams, “Visitor from Bataan,” NYT, June 24, 1945.
“crowded with little Neros”: Romulo, My Brother Americans, 8.
pouring sake: Virginia Benitez Licuanan, Filipinos and Americans: A Love-Hate Relationship (Baguio, 1982), 145.
MacArthur’s penthouse: Richard Connaughton, John Pimlott, and Duncan Anderson, The Battle for Manila (London, 1995), 46.
Leonard Wood Hotel: A.V.H. Hartendorp, The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines (Manila, 1967), 1:481.
One idea was to name: Manuel E. Buenafe, Wartime Philippines (Manila, 1950), 172.
now commemorated: Pronouncement of Jorge Vargas, 1942, in Jose, World War II and the Japanese Occupation, 122.
Quezon had languished: Quezon, Good Fight, 83.
Romulo remembered how … “I made up”: Romulo, Fall of the Philippines, 48.
“a sense of betrayal” … “No change”: Romulo, Mother America, 92, 96.
“America has wasted”: Propaganda Corps, Imperial Japanese Forces, Significance of Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Manila, n.d.), 4. See also America: A Revelation of Her True Character (Manila, n.d.). Both in AHC.
“morally unassailable”: Carlos Romulo, “Asia Must Be Free,” Collier’s, October 20, 1945, 11.
“in the past”: Gerald Horne, Race War: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York, 2004), 36.
“whole native land”: First Proclamation, January 3, 1942, Proclamations of the Commander-in-Chief, Japanese Expeditionary Forces (Manila, 1942), in AHC.
seventeen acts … “against the interests”: Seventh Proclamation, January 14, 1942, in ibid.
“It was as if”: Eliseo Quirino, A Day to Remember (Manila, 1958), 79.
“Every day on my way”: Marcial P. Lichauco, “Dear Mother Putnam”: A Diary of the War in the Philippines ([Manila], 1949), 26.
Japan’s access: A fine overview is Jonathan Marshall, To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War (Berkeley, CA, 1995).
“The Japanese swarmed”: Hartendorp, Japanese Occupation, 1:191.
scoured the city: Quirino, Day to Remember, 138–39.
tearing down empty gas stations: Lichauco, Mother Putnam, 158.
Jungle University … currency board: Earl Jude Paul L. Cleope, Bandit Zone: A History of the Free Areas of Negros Island During the Japanese Occupation, 1942–1945 (Manila, 2002), 64, 79.
repressive techniques: Quirino, Day to Remember, 67; Lichauco, Mother Putnam, 120; and Joan Orendain, “Children of War,” in Under Japanese Rule: Memories and Reflections, ed. Renato Constantino (Quezon City, 1993), 112, 116.
reconcentration zones: Described in Cleope, Bandit Zone. A more common spatial technique was “zonification,” in which the Japanese military would lock down an area until everyone in it was screened by informants and declared loyal or not.
half a million: Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Wars with the U.S. and Japan, and the Politics of History in the Philippines,” in The Philippines and Japan in America’s Shadow, ed. Kiichi Fujiwara and Yoshiko Nagano (Singapore, 2011), 48.
“The applause” … “irrepressible satisfaction”: Antonio M. Molina, Dusk and Dawn in the Philippines: Memoirs of a Living Witness of World War II (Quezon City, 1996), 153.
His father had died: With Japan’s encouragement, wartime Filipinos articulated the suppressed trauma of U.S. colonial violence. On this, see Reynaldo C. Ileto, “World War II: Transient and Enduring Legacies for the Philippines,” in Legacies of World War II in South and East Asia, ed. David Koh Wee Hock (Singapore, 2007), 74–91, and Ileto, “Wars with the U.S. and Japan.”
twenty-one-gun salute: Hartendorp, Japanese Occupation, 1:648.
five times as many aircraft, etc.: Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill, NC, 2012), 78.
“shoestring equipment”: Rem., 168.
to little effect: Manchester, American Caesar, 284–86.
“pitifully small”: George C. Kenney, The MacArthur I Know (New York, 1951), 70, 48.
prepared to sacrifice: Manchester, American Caesar, 296.
“pocketed and cut off”: Rem., 195.
“hit ’em where”: Ibid., 169.
George H. W. Bush: James Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage (Boston, 2003).
inclined toward the Taiwan plan: Robert Ross Smith, Triumph in the Philippines (Washington, DC, 1963), part I.
“American territory” … “undergoing”: Willoughby and Chamberlain, MacArthur, 235–36.
“personal feelings”: Marshall, quoted in Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–1945 (New York, 2008), 27.
“Promises must be kept”: Manchester, American Caesar, 368.
“Douglas, you win”: John Gunther, The Riddle of MacArthur: Japan, Korea and the Far East (New York, 1951), 10.
Hundreds of buildings: Brendan Coyle, Kiska: The Japanese Occupation of an Alaska Island (Fairbanks, 2014), 76–77.
the ensuing battle: Ibid., 122–23.
“a scale and length”: Henry I. Shaw, Bernard C. Nalty, and Edwin T. Turnbladh, History of U.S. Marine Corps Operations in World War II (Washington, DC, 1966), 3:448.
“The heads lay like”: Quoted in Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu, 1995), 192.
four-fifths of the island’s homes: Ibid., 201.
interned thousands: On this sort of “friendly” internment, which occurred on many Pacific islands, see Lamont Lindstrom and Geoffrey M. White, Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War (Washington, DC, 1990), 61.
Japanese army stopped paying: Teodoro A. Agoncillo, The Fateful Years: Japan’s Adventure in the Philippines, 1941–1945 (Quezon City, 1965), 2:556.
Laurel declared: Pacita Pestaño-Jacinto, Living with the Enemy: A Diary of the Japanese Occupation (Pasig City, 1999), 205.
“a noticeable decrease”: Lichauco, Mother Putnam, 182.
dropping dead in the streets: Daniel F. Doeppers, Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 1850–1945 (Madison, WI, 2016), 324–25.
“slapping Filipinos,” etc.: Claro M. Recto to T. Wachi, June 20, 1944, in Documents on the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines, ed. Mauro Garcia (Manila, 1965), 113–14.
Panay: William Gemperle statement, in General Headquarters, South West Pacific Area, Military Intelligence Section, General Staff, Report on the Destruction of Manila and Japanese Atrocities, February 1945, appendix, 13.
“I have returned”: Rem., 216.
“winging very low”: Mañalac, Manila, 90.
They aimed for anything: Smith, Triumph, 91.
Yamashita’s army had already reduced: Ibid.
Yamashita ordered the army: The Yamashita/Iwabuchi conflict is described in ibid., part 4, and Alfonso J. Aluit, By Sword and Fire: The Destruction of Manila in World War II, 3 February–3 March 1945 (Manila, 1994), 372–79.
“We slammed the back door”: Stanley A. Frankel, The 37th Infantry Division in World War II (Washington, DC, 1948), 73.
“the strategic blunder”: Connaughton et al., Battle for Manila, 142.
When Allied troops arrived: The Battle of Manila is chronicled in numerous diaries and memoirs (many cited here). Three overviews are indispensable: Smith, Triumph; Aluit, Sword and Fire; and Connaughton et al., Battle for Manila.
a captured diary: Diary of member of Akatsuki 16709 Force, in Report on the Destruction of Manila, 35.
“bomb the place”: Kenney, MacArthur I Know, 98.
“friendly” … “unthinkable”: Quoted in Smith, Triumph, 294.
“use of heavy firepower” … “This reputation”: Robert S. Beightler, Report on the Activities of the 37th Infantry Division, 1940–1945, quoted in Connaughton et al., Battle for Manila, 175.
“alarming”: Robert S. Beightler, Report After Action: Operations of the 37th Infantry Division, Luzon P.I., 1 November 1944 to 30 June 1945 (M-1 Operation), September 1945, 51, New York Public Library.
“Putting it crudely” … “To me”: Beightler, Report on Activities, quoted in Connaughton et al., Battle for Manila, 175–76.
more than one per second: Aluit, Sword and Fire, 355.
“like lightning bolts”: Owens, Eye-Deep in Hell, 122.
“We made a churned-up pile”: Beightler, Report on Activities, quoted in Connaughton et al., Battle for Manila, 176.
“the rule rather”: XIV Corps, Japanese Defense of Cities as Exemplified by the Battle for Manila (Army Chief of Staff, G-2, Headquarters, Sixth Army, July 1, 1945), 20.
“Block after bloody block”: Frankel, 37th Infantry, 283.
Philippine General Hospital: Aluit, Sword and Fire, 389; Frankel, 37th Infantry, 281–83.
“days of terror” … “I can”: Miguel P. Avanceña, quoted in Aluit, Sword and Fire, 391.
Elpidio Quirino: The following is derived, except where noted, from two survivors’ accounts: Tommy Quirino’s in ibid., 217–301 passim, and Vicky Quirino’s in Connaughton et al., Battle for Manila, 133–38.
“darkest hour”: Elpidio Quirino, “Oration on President Quezon,” in The Quirino Way: Collection of Speeches and Addresses of Elpidio Quirino, ed. Juan Collas ([Philippines], 1955), 23.
Dody, who had sought: Sol H. Gwekoh, Elpidio Quirino: The Barrio School Teacher Who Became President, 2d ed. (Manila, 1950), 85–86.
“If you escaped”: Elpidio Quirino, “The Sad Plight of the Philippines,” November 14, 1945, in Quirino: Selected Speeches, ed. Carlos R. Lazo (Manila, 1953), 15.
A woman who saw him: Kiyoshi Osawa, A Japanese in the Philippines, trans. Tsunesuke Kawashima (Tokyo, 1981), 195.
Arellano’s Legislative Building: Smith, Triumph, 303–304; Frankel, 37th Infantry, 293–94.
sixth-largest city: Manila contained 623,492 people in 1939, according to the census. But by the war’s end it had roughly 1 million. Aluit, Sword and Fire, 398.
“The largest buildings” … “This seemed”: Hartendorp, Japanese Occupation, 2:604–605.
In the month of fighting: Fatality figures from Connaughton et al., Battle for Manila, 174.
extrapolated from figures: Aluit, Sword and Fire, 398–99.
“The whole city”: Jose P. Laurel, War Memoirs (Manila, 1962), 35.
Those planes dropped: Beightler, Report After Action, 118.
“We levelled entire cities,” etc.: Paul V. McNutt, address at Beta Theta Pi Fraternity, November 27, 1946, “McNutt, P. V., Correspondence and Speeches, 1945–46” folder, box 7, HC–DC.
Senator Millard Tydings surveyed: Millard Tydings, “Report on the Philippine Islands,” June 7, 1945, 22, “Philippine Rehabilitation Commission” folder, box 2, ser. 4, Tydings Papers.
1,111,938 war deaths: Reported in “Our Bid for Survival,” 1947, in Collas, Quirino Way, 51, and Joaquin M. Elizalde, “The Case for the Prompt Ratification of the Japanese Peace Treaty,” 1952, 5, in AHC.
Add Japanese: Miki Ishikida, Toward Peace: War Responsibility, Postwar Compensation, and Peace Movements and Education in Japan (New York, 2005), 12.
mainlander fatalities: 10,640 dead (not counting the Leyte and Samar campaigns) according to Smith, Triumph, 652.
“How’d ya learn,” etc.: Oscar S. Villadolid, Born in Freedom: My Life and Times (Quezon City, 2004), 191. Similar stories discussed in Daniel Immerwahr, “‘American Lives’: Pearl Harbor and the United States’ Empire,” in Pearl Harbor and the Attacks of December 8, 1941: A Pacific History, ed. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, KS, forthcoming).
fewer than one in ten: James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (New York, 2011), 202.
“first and foremost”: Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (New York, 1999), 548.
nearly every independent nation: Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943 (Washington, DC, 1955), 39.
“disintegration of the British commonwealth”: Quoted in ibid., 48. The mechanics of aid to Britain in Egypt are described in Edward R. Stettinius Jr., Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory (New York, 1944), chaps. 12–13 and 26; Ivan Dmitri, Flight to Everywhere (New York, 1944); and Hugh B. Cave, Wings Across the World: The Story of the Air Transport Command (New York, 1945), part 3.
“I have seen many”: Max Hastings, Inferno: The World at War, 1939–1945 (New York, 2011), 361.
“It marked in fact,” etc.: Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (1950; Boston, 1985), 4:541.
“tremendous supply base”: Stettinius, Lend-Lease, 288.
Factories in Palestine, etc.: Ibid., 294.
“probably more far-reaching”: John G. Winant, quoted in Steven High, Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–1967 (New York, 2009), 6.
“Nothing is more”: Rexford Guy Tugwell, The Stricken Land: The Story of Puerto Rico (Garden City, NY, 1946), 113.
expected that they’d fall: Annette Palmer, “Rum and Coca Cola: The United States in the British Caribbean, 1940–1945,” The Americas 43 (1987): 441–43; John Gunther, Inside Latin America (New York, 1941), 420.
The Soviet Union, alone: Kenneth S. Coates and William R. Morrison, “The American Rampant: Reflections on the Impact of United States Troops in Allied Countries During World War II,” Journal of World History 2 (1991): 217. Stalin did allow some exceptions: three bases in Ukraine toward the end of the war and two navy-manned weather stations near the Japanese frontier. See Alexandra Richie, Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler, and the Warsaw Uprising (New York, 2013), 538–40.
Nukufetau, etc.: A full list of Seabee locations is in William Bradford Huie, From Omaha to Okinawa: The Story of the Seabees (1945; Annapolis, MD, 1999), appendix.
“what happens in Africa”: Henry Cabot Lodge, quoted in “Colony Plan Stirs Senate,” NYT, February 1, 1919.
thirty thousand installations on two thousand: James R. Blaker, United States Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York, 1990), 33.
“Almost anywhere,” etc.: Cave, Wings, i.
Presidents, too, began to: “Travels Abroad of the President,” Office of the Historian, U.S. State Department, history.state.gov/departmenthistory/travels/president.
“Because of the ethnic distribution”: Security Technical Committee Minutes 7, February 3, 1943, Records of the Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy, 1942–45, Box 79, Notter Records. The sudden onset of U.S. planetary interests is discussed helpfully in Andrew Preston, “Monsters Everywhere: A Genealogy of National Security,” DH 38 (2014): 477–500; John A. Thompson, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca, NY, 2014); and Stephen Wertheim, “Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy in World War II” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2015).
“a mental hazard”: “Maps: Global War Teaches Global Cartography,” Life, August 3, 1942, 57–65.
“Dymaxion map”: “R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World,” Life, March 1, 1943, 41–55.
Richard Edes Harrison: Alan K. Henrikson, “The Map as an ‘Idea’: The Role of Cartographic Imagery During the Second World War,” The American Cartographer 2 (1975): 19–53; Susan Schulten, “Richard Edes Harrison and the Challenge to American Cartography,” Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography 50 (1998): 174–88; Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago, 2001), chap. 9; and William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016), chap. 2.
Goebbels waved: Henrikson, “Map as ‘Idea,’” 37–38.
United Nations logo: Donal McLaughlin, Origin of the Emblem and Other Recollections of the 1945 U.N. Conference (Garrett Park, MD, 1995).
“Never before have persons”: Wayne Whittaker, “Maps for the Air Age,” Popular Mechanics, January 1943, 162.
“round earth,” etc.: Archibald MacLeish, “The Image of Victory,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1942, 5.
global … globalist, globalism, and the pejorative globaloney: On initial usages, see Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press. On frequency, see Google Books Ngrams Viewer, books.google.com/ngrams.
“a global war”: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chat, September 7, 1942, APP. Past presidential speech searched at APP.
“Just as truly”: John Hersey, A Bell for Adano (New York, 1944), vii.
“There is not a single”: C. D. Jackson, quoted in Lynne Olson, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour (New York, 2010), 272.
1.65 million U.S. servicemen swarming: A very good overview is Coates and Morrison, “American Rampant.”
“absolute control”: Rem., 180.
“Never before”: William J. Sebald, quoted in William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (Boston, 1978), 470.
looked for inspiration: Rem., 282.
“Parts of Tokyo”: John Gunther, The Riddle of MacArthur: Japan, Korea and the Far East (New York, 1951), 84.
“the world’s greatest”: Rem., 282.
Public health authorities: Gunther, Riddle of MacArthur, 138–39.
“We the Japanese people,” etc.: Constitution of Japan, 1946, preamble and article 13.
Sirota: John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999), chap. 12.
“summit of the world”: “Final Review of the War,” August 16, 1945, in Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James (New York, 1974), 7:7211.
“the most powerful”: Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference, August 9, 1945, APP.
135 million: Hajo Holborn put the number “under the control of American military government” at 150 million, but I have been unable to reproduce his calculations (American Military Government: Its Organizations and Policies [Washington, DC, 1947], xi). My own accounting, which covers all the colonies plus Japan, Micronesia, and the U.S. sectors of Germany, Austria, and Korea, is in “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” DH 40 (2016): 388. It doesn’t include the transitory stationing of U.S. troops under the banner of “liberation,” as in France, or the very short occupations, such as that of parts of Czechoslovakia for months in 1945, listed in Susan L. Carruthers, The Good Occupation: American Soldiers and the Hazards of Peace (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 6–7.
“plenty of space”: Press release, Interior Department, March 23, 1946; “Mts.—Seals & Flags” folder; box 70; 9-0-2, Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907–1951; ROT. See rest of folder for other flag proposals.
Gruening and his wife: Ernest Gruening, Many Battles: The Autobiography of Ernest Gruening (New York, 1973), 371.
There were excited murmurs: Michio Kitahara, Children of the Sun: The Japanese and the Outside World (New York, 1989), 95; William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 (Boston, 1978), 474.
Philippine statehood: Hernando J. Abaya, Betrayal in the Philippines (New York, 1946), 171–79; “Philippine Statehood” folder, box 17, HC–DC; “Statehood for P.I.,” Manila Evening News, January 26, 1946; Gladstone Williams, “What to Do Now with the Philippines?” Atlanta Constitution, February 28, 1945; and “World Fronts,” Amsterdam News, March 3, 1945.
proposed adding Iceland: Proposal by Rep. Bud Gearhardt, discussed in “The Ramparts of the North,” New York Journal-American, July 21, 1945.
“State of the American Pacific”: CDA 315, “A Study of Pacific Bases: A Report by the Subcommittee, House of Representatives,” August 22, 1945, 21, Notter Records, box 126.
“an imperial power”: Quoted in Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York, 2011), 103. See also 117–23 for a survey of U.S. territorial ambitions at the end of the Second World War.
“From the point of view” … “The question”: Albert Viton, American Empire in Asia? (New York, 1943), 286–87. On public expressions of annexationism during the war, see William G. Carleton, “The Dawn of a New Day,” Vital Speeches of the Day, December 1, 1943, 117–25.
fourth-largest empire: Dismantling Japan’s empire bumped the United States up in the ranks to the world’s fourth-largest empire by population.
manufacturing production: Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (1987; New York, 1989), 358.
area smaller than Connecticut: Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” DH 40 (2016): 389–90.
one out of every three … one in fifty: 1940: 31.10 percent; 1965: 2.18 percent. Calculated from MPD. This count is of annexed colonies, not satellites (e.g., East Germany under the Soviet Union) or occupied countries (e.g., Japan under MacArthur).
“Today, freedom,” etc.: Rem., 276.
“But when they do”: Langston Hughes, “Colored Lived There Once,” Chicago Defender, January 27, 1945.
“The bearing” … “Now”: Luis Taruc, Born of the People (New York, 1953), 64–65.
“From one end”: Harold R. Isaacs, No Peace for Asia (New York, 1947), 1.
“an enormous pot”: Albert C. Wedemeyer, quoted in Ronald H. Spector, In the Ruins of Empire: The Japanese Surrender and the Battle for Postwar Asia (New York, 2007), 21. See also Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2007). The notion of a “Malayan Spring,” from which I have extrapolated a more general “Asian Spring,” is discussed in Harper’s The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (New York, 1999), chap. 2.
twenty thousand peasants: Described in Abaya, Betrayal, 125–30. A figure of thirty-five thousand is given in “GIs Fear Plan to Use Them Against Filipinos,” Daily Worker, January 9, 1946.
“We are now,” etc.: General Marshall’s Report: The Winning of the War in Europe and the Pacific (New York, 1945), 118.
War Department announced: John C. Sparrow, History of Personnel Demobilization in the United States Army (Washington, DC, 1952), 141.
On a single day: Steven Kalgaard Ashby, “Shattered Dreams: The American Working Class and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945–1949” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1993), 130.
“At the rate” … “in a very”: Truman to John Folger, November 16, 1945, quoted in David R. B. Ross, Preparing for Ulysses: Politics and Veterans During World War II (New York, 1969), 187.
“disintegration” … “dangerous speed”: Harry S. Truman, Memoirs (Garden City, NY, 1955), 1:509.
“Let us leave” … “The Filipinos”: Abaya, Betrayal, 135, 148.
letter of support: Ashby, “Shattered Dreams,” 143.
passed a resolution: Erwin Marquit, “The Demobilization Movement of January 1946,” Nature, Society, and Thought 15 (2002): 24–25.
“vast new tasks”: “Styler Gives Talk on Redeployment,” Daily Pacifican, January 8, 1946.
booed and catcalled: “20,000 Attend Orderly Meeting,” Daily Pacifican, January 8, 1946.
Honolulu … Korea … Calcutta: Ashby, “Shattered Dreams,” 138.
Guam: Sparrow, Personnel Demobilization, 163; Ashby, “Shattered Dreams,” 138.
“What kind,” etc.: William D. Simpkins, letter, Daily Pacifican, November 15, 1945.
“in the Oriental surge”: Robert B. Pearsall, letter, Daily Pacifican, November 30, 1945.
“disgusted with,” etc.: Daniel Eugene Garcia, “Class and Brass: Demobilization, Working Class Politics, and American Foreign Policy Between World War and Cold War,” DH 34 (2010): 694–95.
“plain mutiny”: Ashby, “Shattered Dreams,” 170–71.
under the Articles of War: The Articles of War, Approved June 4, 1920, articles 66 and 67.
“You men forget”: R. Alton Lee, “The Army ‘Mutiny’ of 1946,” Journal of American History 53 (1966): 562.
“acute homesickness” … “not inherently”: MacArthur, quoted in Sparrow, Personnel Demobilization, 322.
“a clock”: Rexford Guy Tugwell, The Stricken Land: The Story of Puerto Rico (Garden City, NY, 1946), v.
“our influence”: Truman, Memoirs, 2:91.
sixth largest: Terry H. Anderson, The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944–1947 (Columbia, MO, 1981), 152.
take over the bonds: The history of the Philippine bonded debt to the United States is detailed in Manuel Roxas, address, January 26, 1948, in “Territories Committee, Philippine Islands” folder, box 5, ser. 4, Tydings Papers.
“food crisis”: Press release, April 22, 1946, “Pub. Relations Press Releases, 1946, Pt. B” folder, box 11, HC–Manila.
“provide adequately”: “Doc. B.,” 1940, enclosed in E. D. Hester to Frank P. Lockhart, November 13, 1944, “Emergency Proclamation” folder, box 1, HC–Pol/Econ.
“the death or capture”: “Doc. A,” November 13, 1944, enclosed in ibid.
“acceptable or legitimate”: E. D. Hester to Frank P. Lockhart, January 12, 1945, “Emergency Proclamation” folder, box 1, HC–Pol/Econ.
“There is little doubt”: E. D. Hester to Richard R. Ely, July 3, 1945, “Hester, E. D.” folder, box 2, HC–Pol/Econ.
“This situation,” etc.: “McNutt Raises Question of P.I. Readiness for Freedom July 4th,” Manila Evening News, January 23, 1946.
“All Asia”: Paul V. McNutt, Report on the Philippines,” 1945, 14, “McNutt, P. V., Correspondence and Speeches, 1945–46” folder, box 7, HC–DC.
“attracted the wonder” … “to betray”: Paul V. McNutt, “The Filipinos Are Our Friends,” Manila Evening News, January 26, 1946.
“This is the first instance,” etc.: Harry S. Truman to Kenneth McKellar, April 3, 1946, “Independence, Ceremonies, 1946” folder, box 4, HC–DC.
“undoubtedly seriously involved”: Paul Steintorf to James F. Byrnes, September 19, 1945; “Collaboration” folder, box 1, HC–Pol/Econ.
“Roxas is no,” etc.: Douglas MacArthur, quoted in press release from the Office of the Commanding General, Army Forces of the Pacific, May 9, 1946; “Pub. Relations Press Releases, 1946, Pt. A” folder, box 11, HC–Manila.
“Not a single senator”: Abaya, Betrayal, 92.
109 guerrillas: Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley, CA, 1977).
“We are a troubled”: Manila Evening News, July 4, 1946.
specially sewn: Press release, May 31, 1946; “Pub. Relations Press Releases, 1946, Pt. A” folder, box 11, HC–Manila.
“America has buried”: Quoted in Go, Patterns of Empire, 105.
Hawai‘i and Alaska: The most thorough account of Hawai‘i/Alaska statehood is John S. Whitehead, Completing the Union: Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the Battle for Statehood (Albuquerque, NM, 2004). In what follows, I have relied on research connecting statehood to decolonization, namely Robert David Johnson, Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1998); Gretchen Heefner, “‘A Symbol of the New Frontier’: Hawaiian Statehood, Anti-Colonialism, and Winning the Cold War,” Pacific Historical Review 74 (2005): 545–74; Sarah Miller-Davenport, “State of the New: Hawai‘i Statehood and Global Decolonization in American Culture, 1945–1978” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2014); Robert David Johnson, “Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the United States as a Pacific Nation,” in his Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization (New York, 2015), 162–71; and A. G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ, 2018), chap. 14.
“mark the beginning”: Butler to Julius A. Krug, March 7, 1947, “Citizens’ Statehood Committee, 1947–51” folder, Governor’s Files, GOV9-3, HSA.
“We do not want,” etc.: “Hawaii Can Wait,” Worcester Telegram, March 1947, in “Editors—Opposition to Statehood” folder, box 4, Hawaiian Statehood Commission Records, COM18, HSA.
“Can America lead”: Ernest Gruening, “Alaska Statehood Delay Invites Red Attack,” San Francisco Examiner, March 9, 1950.
“How can we fervently”: Gruening to Sam Wilder King, c. 1952–1954, folder 226, box 59, Gruening Papers.
“shout about ‘colonialism’”: Quoted in Johnson, Gruening, 191.
“Boston tea party”: Gruening to King, c. 1952–1954, folder 226, box 59, Gruening Papers.
Alaska Is a Colony: Held in folder 316, box 754, Gruening Papers.
“These are troubled,” etc.: Truman to Joseph C. O’Mahoney, May 5, 1950, APP.
“tremendous psychological,” etc.: Truman, Letter to the President of the Senate on Statehood for Hawaii and Alaska, November 27, 1950, APP.
“impassible difference,” etc.: Quoted in Heefner, “Symbol,” 546.
didn’t speak a word … Costa Rica: Wenzell Brown, Dynamite on Our Doorstep: Puerto Rican Paradox (New York, 1945), 32, 6.
“complete madness” … “berserk” … “One cannot”: Ibid., 71, 90, 193.
feared that mainland doctors: Ibid., 79.
“intense, fanatical nationalism”: Ibid., 201.
“paralyzing jolt”: John Gunther, Inside Latin America (New York, 1941), 423.
“cesspool” … “unsolvable”: “Puerto Rico: Senate Investigating Committee Finds It an Unsolvable Problem,” Life, March 8, 1943.
“would have revolted”: Rexford Guy Tugwell, The Stricken Land: The Story of Puerto Rico (Garden City, NY, 1946), 126.
only ten employees: James P. Davis, “Statement of the Director of Territories and Island Possessions, Department of the Interior, Before the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs,” January 10, 1949; “Comm. on Interior & Insular Affairs” folder; box 28; Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907–1950; 9-0-1 Administrative, Committees, Interior; ROT.
“the most important”: Gunther, Inside Latin America, 427.
“full, flexible” … Muñoz Marín joked: Tugwell, Stricken Land, 10.
Muñoz Marín invited: Luis Muñoz Marín, Memorias: Autobiografía pública, 1898–1940 (San Juan, 1982), 1:63.
vote for Albizu: Ibid., 76–77.
“weapon of imperial vengeance”: Ibid., 150.
“all hope of life”: Luis Muñoz Marín, “Alerta a la conciencia puertorriqueña,” El Mundo, February 10, 1946.
“emotional confusion” … “wanting”: Luis Muñoz Marín, Speech at Baranquitas, July 17, 1951, in Kal Wagenheim and Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, The Puerto Ricans: A Documentary History (Princeton, NJ, 2013), 219.
Muñoz Marín’s party received: César J. Ayala and Rafael Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History Since 1898 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 153.
“the biggest and”: Luis Muñoz Marín, “Nuevos caminos hacia viejos objectivos,” El Mundo, June 28, 1946.
“Two million people”: “Tugwell Assails Lack of Policy for Puerto Rico,” New York Herald Tribune, September 17, 1943.
“kept shooting children”: Earl Parker Hanson, Transformation: The Story of Modern Puerto Rico (New York, 1955), 61.
“If the United States were”: C. Wright Mills, Clarence Senior, and Rose Kohn Goldsen, The Puerto Rican Journey: New York’s Newest Migrants (New York, 1950), 3.
“I believe that” … “Malthusian”: “El partido socialista—dice Muñoz Marín—es sencillamente un partido de gente pobre,” El Mundo, June 27, 1923. Two illuminating accounts of the politics of birth control in Puerto Rico are Annette B. Ramírez de Arellano and Conrad Seipp, Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983), and Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, CA, 2002). I draw on both heavily in this chapter.
Herbert Hoover: Herbert Hoover, Memoirs (New York, 1952), 2:359.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Tugwell, Stricken Land, 35–36.
“only hope”: Quoted in Ramírez de Arellano and Seipp, Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception, 46.
underpopulated: Muñoz Marín, Memorias, 1898–1940, 1:152.
“invade the very insides”: Irene Vilar, The Ladies’ Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets, trans. Gregory Rabassa (1996; New York, 2009), 45.
Whereas most states: Ramírez de Arellano and Seipp, Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception, 108–109.
Pincus: Detailed accounts of Pincus and the pill are James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830 (New York, 1978), part 7, and Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner, The Fertility Doctor: John Rock and the Reproductive Revolution (Baltimore, 2008), chaps. 6–7.
RABBIT WITHOUT: “Rabbit Without Parents Amazes Men of Science,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 2, 1939.
“population explosion”: Gregory Pincus, The Control of Fertility (New York, 1965), 6.
“eighty frustrated”: Rock, quoted in Marsh and Ronner, Fertility Doctor, 154. Pincus’s team would also try hormonal contraceptives on a small group of psychotic women at the Worcester State Hospital before launching the Río Piedras study.
“How can we get”: Reed, From Private Vice, 358.
team considered tests: Lara V. Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (New Haven, CT, 2001), 98; Marsh and Ronner, Fertility Doctor, 170.
“certain experiments”: Pincus to McCormick, March 4, 1954, quoted in Bernard Asbell, The Pill: A Biography of the Drug That Changed the World (New York, 1995), 116.
The first experiment: Ramírez de Arellano and Seipp, Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception, 110.
“too many side”: Edris Rice-Wray, quoted in Marsh and Ronner, Fertility Doctor, 195.
“emotional super-activity”: Ramírez de Arellano and Seipp, Colonialism, Catholicism, and Contraception, 116.
“whatever you call”: Adaline Satterthwaite, quoted in ibid., 118.
all sorts of experimental contraceptives: Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 124.
“one of the most,” etc.: Reuben Hill, J. Mayone Stycos, and Kurt W. Back, The Family and Population Control: A Puerto Rican Experiment in Social Change (Chapel Hill, NC, 1959), 116, 169, 174.
18 percent of all hospital deliveries: J. Mayone Stycos, “Female Sterilization in Puerto Rico,” Eugenics Quarterly 1 (1954): 4.
No governmental program: Hill et al., Family and Population Control, 180.
fourth delivery: Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 157.
informed consent: A case for the sterilizations as nonconsensual is Bonnie Mass, “Puerto Rico: A Case Study of Population Control,” Latin American Perspectives 4 (1977): 66–81. A thoughtful and strongly cautionary view, finding “no evidence” of a campaign to coerce women, is Laura Briggs, “Discourses of ‘Forced Sterilization’ in Puerto Rico: The Problem with the Speaking Subaltern,” Differences 10 (1998): 30–66.
“The only way”: Iris Lopez, Matters of Choice: Puerto Rican Women’s Struggle for Reproductive Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ, 2008), 7–8.
nearly half: 46.7 percent. Harriet B. Presser, Sterilization and Fertility Decline in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, CA, 1973), 61–66. For a review of other studies that corroborate Presser’s figures, see Mass, “Case Study,” 72.
anywhere else in the world: Presser, Sterilization and Fertility, chap. 10. The India figure counts sterilizations per 100 married women, but many of India’s sterilizations were vasectomies, making Puerto Rico’s high rate of sterilized women still more striking.
“a brilliantly successful”: Robert Coughlan, “World Birth Control Challenge,” Life, November 23, 1959, 170.
leave the island: Especially helpful accounts are Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), and Eileen J. Suárez Findlay, We Are Left Without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico (Durham, NC, 2014).
training program for women: Findlay, Left Without a Father, 76–77.
59 percent: Mills et al., Puerto Rican Journey, 88.
one in seven: Findlay, Left Without a Father, 93.
one in four: Clarence Senior’s figures, reported in Elena Padilla, Up from Puerto Rico (New York, 1958), 21.
several thousand people … Forty cadets: A. C. Schlenker to J. Edgar Hoover, December 23, 1947, in Albizu FBI File, section 5, box 2.
“puppet” … “high priest” … “revolution”: Quoted in A. W. Maldonado, Luis Muñoz Marín: Puerto Rico’s Democratic Revolution (San Juan, 2006), 299.
“We have to revert”: Albizu’s speech reported in Schlenker to Hoover, December 23, 1947, and in Jack West, report on Pedro Albizu Campos, May 4, 1948, 22, both in Albizu FBI File, section 5, box 2.
“The United States tells” … “The surgeon”: Speech at Arecibo, March 15, 1948, in West, report on Albizu, May 4, 1948, 45.
“ten years behind”: Quoted in Schlenker to Hoover, December 23, 1947.
“far beyond”: ACLU statement, quoted in Ruth M. Reynolds, Campus in Bondage: A 1948 Microcosm of Puerto Rico in Bondage (New York, 1989), 198.
The police: Ivonne Acosta, La mordaza: Puerto Rico, 1948–1957 (Río Piedras, 1989), 107.
growing migratory stream: The tension between migration and independence is explored with great acuity in Duany, Nation on the Move.
moment for action: Calculations behind the timing are discussed in Olga Jiménez de Wagenheim, Nationalist Heroines: Puerto Rican Women History Forgot, 1930s–1950s (Princeton, NJ, 2017), 26–27.
“hour of immortality”: June 11, 1950, speech at Manati, reported in Robert E. Thornton, report on Pedro Albizu Campos, May 22, 1951, Albizu FBI File, section 9, box 2.
That hour struck: On the 1950 Uprising, I’ve relied on Miñi Seijo Bruno, La insurrección nacionalista en Puerto Rico, 1950 (Río Piedras, 1997), and Jiménez de Wagenheim, Nationalist Heroines.
bullet through the window … hit the floor … daughters cowered: Luis Muñoz Marín, Memorias: Autobiografía pública, 1940–1952 (San German, PR, 1992), 2:238.
“What is known”: Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge Jr., American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman—and the Shoot-Out That Stopped It (New York, 2005), 242.
drastically increased its security: Ibid., 317.
“shooting scrape”: Drew Pearson, “‘Shooting Scrape’ Upset Truman,” Washington Post, April 13, 1952.
“one of those mad”: “Uprising in Puerto Rico,” NYT, November 1, 1950.
“news of a day”: Paul Harbrecht, “Puerto Rico: Operation Bootstrap,” America, December 9, 1950, 301.
lost its farm: Robert J. Donovan, The Assassins (New York, 1955), 174.
“tried to bring about”: Quoted in Benjamin Bradlee, “Planned Riot Demonstration, Collazo Says,” Washington Post, March 6, 1951.
stuck in his mind: Donovan, Assassins, 177.
“How little” … “They don’t know”: Ibid., 173.
“lawless lunatics”: Quoted in Jiménez de Wagenheim, Nationalist Heroines, 263.
police rounded up: Acosta, La mordaza, 119.
One officer testified: Officer Melendez, testimony in William B. Holloman, report on Pedro Albizu Campos, January 31, 1955, Albizu FBI File, section 14, box 2. Carmen María Pérez González, one of Albizu’s comrades, also claimed that Albizu fired guns (Jiménez de Wagenheim, Nationalist Heroines, 109).
“looked like a cheese grater”: Seijo Bruno, La insurrección nacionalista, 170.
cleared the island: Documented in Acosta, La mordaza, 120.
two-day registration: Maldonado, Muñoz Marín, 305.
United Nations: The UN decision to remove Puerto Rico from the list of colonies was contested at the time, and later, the Decolonization Committee proposed reconsidering the case of Puerto Rico and the General Assembly agreed. Excellent guides to the complex politics of the constitution and of the UN are José Trías Monge, Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World (New Haven, CT, 1997), chaps. 10–12, and Ayala and Bernabe, Puerto Rico, chap. 8.
“butterfly”: Muñoz Marín, Memorias, 1940–1952, 2:383.
“no-nation” … “somewhat shapeless”: Vilar, Ladies’ Gallery, 72.
“defies duplication”: Chester Bowles, foreword to Hanson, Transformation, x.
Operation Bootstrap: Overview in James L. Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton, NJ, 1986), chaps. 4–5.
“one of the few”: “Thank Heaven for Puerto Rico,” Life, March 15, 1954, 24.
“all traces”: Muñoz Marín to Truman, April 9, 1952, quoted in Maldonado, Muñoz Marín, 317.
“almost unrestricted”: Trías Monge, Puerto Rico, 3.
“the wildest scene”: Joe Martin, My First Fifty Years in Politics (New York, 1960), 217. For a detailed chronicle based on interviews with two shooters, see Manuel Roig-Franzia, “A Terrorist in the House,” Washington Post, February 22, 2004.
fifty-fifty: “Fanatics Shoot Five in Congress,” Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1954.
never really the same: Paul Kanjorski, views reported in Roig-Franzia, “Terrorist.”
jagged bullet hole: Thanks to Jennifer Blancato at the Architect of the Capitol for confirming this.
“sublime heroism”: Quoted in Peter Kihss, “San Juan Studies Rebel Chief’s Act,” NYT, March 4, 1954. On who gave the orders, see Jiménez de Wagenheim, Nationalist Heroines, 252.
fired on the police: Discussion of Albizu’s role in the violence in Jiménez de Wagenheim, Nationalist Heroines, 174.
“I am choked”: Peter Kihss, “Terrorists’ Chief Held in San Juan After Gun Battle,” NYT, March 7, 1954.
“poisonous wave,” etc.: Albizu to Nieves Tarrido, June 3, 1951, in Albizu FBI File, section 10, box 2.
“We live”: Ibid. Albizu’s followers reported similar experiences when imprisoned or under government surveillance. They saw colored rays, heard electronic voices, and felt electric shocks and radiation waves. A helpful discussion is Andrea Friedman, Citizenship in Cold War America: National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent (Amherst, MA, 2014), chap. 4.
“about as lunatic”: “Aftermath in Puerto Rico,” NYT, March 7, 1954.
they misbehaved less: Clarence Senior, The Puerto Ricans: Strangers—Then Neighbors (Chicago, 1965), 51–52.
West Side Story: Useful accounts are Frances Negrón-Muntaner, “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses,” Social Text 18 (2000): 83–106, and Elizabeth A. Wells, West Side Story: Cultural Perspectives on an American Musical (Lanham, MD, 2011). I’ve relied here especially on Julia L. Foulkes, There’s a Place for Us: West Side Story and New York (Chicago, 2016).
“I can’t do”: Quoted in Craig Zadan, Sondheim and Co. (New York, 1974), 13.
“When we’re a state”: Foulkes, Place for Us, 51.
La Prensa … “I wasn’t about”: Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat (New York, 2010), 42.
forty thousand productions: Foulkes, Place for Us, 1.
“less complex”: Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat (New York, 2011), 112.
“new frontier”: State of the Union, January 11, 1962, APP.
“I would annex,” etc.: W. T. Stead, ed., The Last Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes (London, 1902), 190.
“technically feasible” … “desirable”: 1975 study, results published in Richard D. Johnson and Charles Holbrow, eds., Space Settlements: A Design Study (Washington, DC, 1977), 1, 181.
NASA appointed: Anne M. Platoff, “Where No Flag Has Gone Before: Political and Technical Aspects of Placing a Flag on the Moon,” NASA Contractor Report 188251, www
“a symbolic” … “not to be construed”: Ibid., 6.
internationalist spirit: On the non-imperial character of the event, see Daniel Immerwahr, “The Moon Landing: Twilight of Empire,” Modern American History 1 (2018): 129–33.
new balance of forces: The insufficiency of the “power” explanation for global decolonization is intelligently discussed in Frank Ninkovich, “Culture and Anti-Imperialism,” in Asia Pacific in the Age of Globalization, ed. Robert David Johnson (New York, 2015), 259–70.
new technologies: An important overview touching on these issues is Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 2008).
down by some ten million: Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1998), 223.
world rubber consumption: Harry Barron, Modern Synthetic Rubbers, 3d ed. (London, 1949), 8.
70 percent of the world’s supply: Brooks Emeny, The Strategy of Raw Materials: A Study of America in Peace and War (New York, 1938), 132.
Sherman tank … heavy bomber … battleship: Mark R. Finlay, Growing American Rubber: Strategic Plants and the Politics of National Security (New Brunswick, NJ, 2009), 171.
“could offer only”: Quoted in Charles Morrow Wilson, Trees and Test Tubes: The Story of Rubber (New York, 1943), 232.
97 percent of the U.S. rubber: Reconstruction Finance Corporation, The Government’s Rubber Projects: A History of the U.S. Government’s National and Synthetic Rubber Programs, 1941–1955 (Washington, DC, 1955), 2:361.
“If a survey,” etc.: “Rubber to Stretch,” July 1942, in Papers of Harold L. Ickes, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, box 113.
“so dangerous”: Bernard Baruch, Report of the Rubber Survey Committee, September 10, 1942, 5.
“the situation”: Letter to Rubber Director, November 26, 1942, APP.
“every bit of rubber”: Radio Address on the Scrap Rubber Campaign, June 12, 1942, APP.
seven pounds of scrap rubber: Seth Garfield, In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region (Durham, NC, 2013), 83.
wooden wheels? Steel wheels?: RFC, Government’s Rubber Projects, 2:500.
Thousands of scientists: See Finlay, Growing American Rubber.
baby bottles: Wilson, Trees and Test Tubes, 132, 206.
condoms: Stephen Fenichell, Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century (New York, 1996), 186.
“not in sight”: Eugene Staley, Raw Materials in Peace and War (New York, 1937), 7.
“require a miracle”: Leon Henderson, quoted in Wilson, Trees and Test Tubes, 209.
“The definitive solution”: Quoted in Alfred E. Eckes Jr., The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin, TX, 1979), 67.
Dietrich: Yvette Florio Lane, “‘No Fertile Soil for Pathogens’: Rayon, Advertising, and Biopolitics in Late Weimar Germany,” Journal of Social History 44 (2010): 546.
“definitely solved”: Fenichell, Plastic, 183.
Hitler had not solved: My account depends on Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology, IG Farben in the Nazi Era, new ed. (New York, 2001), and Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York, 2006).
two months of fighting: Hayes, Industry and Ideology, 191.
largely using horses: David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (New York, 2007), 35.
“brightly illuminated” … “still strikes”: Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans. Stuart Woolf (1958; New York, 1976), 19.
“be a son-of-a-bitch”: Bernard Baruch’s instructions to Bradley Dewey, quoted in Henry J. Inman, Rubber Mirror: Reflections of the Rubber Division’s First 100 Years (Akron, OH, 2009), 111.
“I don’t think”: C. S. Marvel, interview by J. E. Mulvaney, n.d., 11, folder 1-5, box 1, Carl S. Marvel Papers, CHF.
Just one such plant: Norman V. Carlisle and Frank B. Latham, Miracles Ahead!: Better Living in the Postwar World (New York, 1944), 151.
In mid-1944: Wartime production figures from Fenichell, Plastic, 194, and Robert A. Solo, Synthetic Rubber: A Case Study (Washington, DC, 1959), 87.
“The Germans apparently”: William O. Baker, interview by Marcy Goldstein and Jeffrey L. Sturchio, May 23 and June 18, 1985, 49, CHF.
nine in ten pounds: Rubber Reserve Company, Report on the Rubber Program, 1940–45, Supplement No. 1, Year 1945 (Washington, DC, 1946), 15.
“one of the most remarkable”: Melvin A. Brenner, The Outlook for Synthetic Rubber (Washington, DC, 1944), 1.
Korean War: Vernon Herbert and Attilio Bisio, Synthetic Rubber: A Project That Had to Succeed (Westport, CT, 1985), 142–44.
blue-ribbon commission: The President’s Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom (Washington, DC, 1952), 2:101.
30 percent of the market: Finlay, Growing American Rubber, 12.
5 percent of the world demand: Tooze, Wages of Destruction, 446.
Freinkel: Susan Freinkel, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (New York, 2011), 2–3. On plastic, I’ve also relied on Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), and Fenichell, Plastic.
“Synthetica”: “Plastics in 1940,” Fortune, October 1940, 92–93.
sought to use plastic: Fenichell, Plastic, 206; Freinkel, Plastic, 6.
large battleship: Barrett L. Crandall, The Plastics Industry (Boston, 1946), 11.
a GI could expect: B. H. Weil and Victor J. Anhorn, Plastic Horizons (Lancaster, PA, 1944), 77–82; Erna Risch, United States Army in World War II: The Technical Services; The Quartermaster Corps: Organization, Supply, and Services (Washington, DC, 1953), 1:58–74.
“virtually nothing” … “anything”: Meikle, American Plastic, 146.
plastic handles: Weil and Anhorn, Plastic Horizons, 130.
“The whole world”: Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1957; New York, 1972), 99.
all flags: Jacob Rosin and Max Eastman, The Road to Abundance (New York, 1953), 29, 32.
volume of plastics: Vaclav Smil, Transforming the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences (New York, 2006), 122.
“a regiment,” etc.: Williams Haynes, The Chemical Front (New York, 1943), 12–13.
Camphor: Carlisle and Latham, Miracles Ahead!, 168.
“as simply as”: Haynes, Chemical Front, 16.
“synthetic age” … “freedom”: Rosin and Eastman, Road to Abundance. See Edward D. Melillo, “Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the ‘Synthetic Age’ in World History,” Past and Present 223 (2014): 233–70.
“how to synthesize”: Richard P. Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” Caltech Engineering and Science 23 (1960): 36.
rubber … plastic … margarine: J. C. Fisher and R. H. Pry, “A Simple Substitution Model of Technological Change,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 3 (1971): 87.
Geopolitical treatises: See, for example, Staley, Raw Materials, and Emeny, Strategy. The science journalist Edwin E. Slossen saw far more clearly than the strategists how the laboratory might replace the land, but even he recommended that the United States acquire more colonies in pursuit of rubber. Creative Chemistry (Garden City, NY, 1919), 156.
international management: A cogent presentation of the idea is C.W.W. Greenidge, “Tasks for an International Colonial Conference,” The Crown Colonist, December 1943, 833–35. Enthusiasm within the State Department is registered throughout the Notter Records. See, for example, CDA 159, “Summary Analysis of Certain Problems Relating to the Development of the Petroleum and Other Resources of Dependent Areas,” May 1944 (box 124); PWC 248, “Proposal for an International Trusteeship System,” May 1944 (microfilm 1221); and DA 30, “The United States and Trusteeship,” December 1945 (box 132).
“We can produce”: PMPC, Resources for Freedom, 131.
reports that followed: Important surveys are Hans H. Landsberg, Leonard L. Fischman, and Joseph L. Fisher, Resources in America’s Future: Patterns of Requirements and Availabilities, 1960–2000 (Baltimore, 1963); National Commission on Materials Policy, Material Needs and the Environment Today and Tomorrow (Washington, DC, 1973); and National Commission on Supplies and Shortages, Government and the Nation’s Resources (Washington, DC, 1976).
“not a serious”: NCSS, Government and the Nation’s Resources, ix.
“The truth,” etc.: U Thant, “The Decade of Development,” 1962, in Public Papers of the Secretaries-General of the United Nations, ed. Andrew W. Cordier and Max Harrelson (New York, 1976), 6:118.
Places that had once been: On synthetic competition, see Eckes, Struggle for Minerals, 234. On quinine, see Paul F. Russell, Man’s Mastery of Malaria (London, 1955), 112.
cost of extractive: Harold J. Barnett and Chandler Morse, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Scarcity (Baltimore, 1963), chap. 8.
didn’t even mention security: NCMP, Material Needs and the Environment. The irrelevance of raw materials to major postwar interventions is explored in Stephen D. Krasner, Defending the National Interest: Raw Materials Investments and U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, NJ, 1978).
59 percent of the world’s proven oil: Geir Lundestad, “Empire by Invitation?: The United States and Western Europe, 1945–52,” Journal of Peace Research 23 (1966): 264.
“may have to,” etc.: Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York, 2015), 185.
Nixon administration was serious: Lizette Alvarez, “Britain Says U.S. Planned to Seize Oil in ’73 Crisis,” NYT, January 2, 2004.
matter of rising prices: A governmental investigation attributed the 1973–74 oil shock to panicked hoarding rather than inadequate supply. NSCC, Nation’s Resources, chap. 4. Also see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London, 2011), chap. 7.
The moon suits: NASA, “Space Suit Evolution: From Custom Tailored to Off-the-Rack,” 1994, history.nasa.gov/spacesuits.pdf.
The fifty-star flag that: DuPont, “DuPont Science: Out of This World and Down to Earth,” www2
“a depressing experience”: Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943 (Washington, DC, 1955), 68.
MANILA PROBABLY OURS: Lowell Evening Mail, April 30, 1898.
“swarming ant-heap”: WTR, 11:43.
USS Oregon: Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York, 2009), 20.
“ripe for dying”: WTR, 11:143.
MacArthur staged a lavish reception: Helen Herron Taft, Recollections of Full Years (New York, 1914), 144–45.
early U.S. colonial buildings: Gerard Lico, Arkitekturang Filipino: A History of Architecture and Urbanism in the Philippines (Quezon City, 2008), 230.
“nail currant jelly”: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Panama Canal,” in The Pacific Ocean in History, ed. H. Morse Stephens and Herbert E. Bolton (New York, 1917), 145.
Panama Canal Zone: In the following account, I’ve relied especially on David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York, 1977); Greene, Canal Builders; and Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu, The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal (Princeton, NJ, 2011).
yellow fever and resistance to malaria: J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York, 2010), chap. 2.
caskets: Marie D. Gorgas and Burton J. Hendrick, William Crawford Gorgas: His Life and Work (New York, 1924), 143, 174.
“I shall never forget”: Alfred Dottin, in Competition for the Best True Stories of Life and Work on the Isthmus of Panama During the Construction of the Panama Canal (Balboa, Panama, 1963), 105.
“whirlpool”: Quoted in Jeffrey W. Parker, “Empire’s Angst: The Politics of Race, Migration, and Sex Work in Panama, 1903–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2013), 23.
“dark and gloomy,” etc.: Gorgas and Hendrick, Gorgas, 141.
Delays, pileups, and breakdowns: Maurer and Yu, Big Ditch, 99–101.
pyrethrum: McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 460.
mainland wives, etc.: Greene, Canal Builders, 116–21; Michael E. Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone (Durham, NC, 2014), chap. 2.
medical exams … forcibly hospitalize: Parker, “Empire’s Angst,” chap. 3.
eight tons of earth: McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 496.
one cubic yard: Maurer and Yu, Big Ditch, 103.
“Today you dig”: Matthew Parker, Panama Fever: The Battle to Build the Canal (London, 2007), 341.
records kept on the deaths: Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh, 1985), 31.
“ordnance requirements”: R. H. Somers, “Ordnance Inspection,” Industrial Standardization, June 1942, 155.
sixty-seven pounds: Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1943–45 (Washington, DC, 1968), 825.
fourteen ports … a hundred ports: Frank T. Hines, “Two Wars,” Army Transportation Journal, August 1945, 21–22.
logistics had been a specialist’s term: Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943, 9–11.
“obviously” … “pathway to China”: Quoted in Frank H. Heck, “Airline to China,” in The Army Air Forces in World War II, ed. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate (Chicago, 1958), 7:114.
four thousand aircraft: Kevin Conley Ruffner, Luftwaffe Field Divisions (Oxford, UK, 1990), 3.
one plane every four minutes: Jeffrey A. Engel, Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 20.
“knocked-down shipping”: Leighton and Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943, 640.
“A crow”: Ivan Dmitri, Flight to Everywhere (New York, 1944), 26.
Van Vleck, a curator: Jenifer Van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 142.
“probably all the camels”: Hugh B. Cave, Wings Across the World: The Story of the Air Transport Command (New York, 1945), 62.
“aluminum trail”: William H. Tunner, Over the Hump (1964; Washington, DC, 1985), 46–47.
once every eleven minutes: Reginald M. Cleveland, Air Transport at War (New York, 1946), 113.
one every minute and twelve seconds: Tunner, Over the Hump, 113.
“Roads, it would seem”: Cave, Wings, 106.
“knew that we could fly”: Tunner, Over the Hump, 59.
Britain cut Germany’s transatlantic cables: An excellent account of this and the Zimmermann telegram is Daniel R. Headrick, The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851–1945 (New York, 1991), chap. 9. On cables, I’ve been guided also by Jonathan Reed Winkler, Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I (Cambridge, MA, 2008).
U.S. telegraphic connection: Winkler, Nexus, 152–54.
eight words transmitted … eight million words: U.S. Army Forces in the European Theater, Service: The Story of the Signal Corps (Paris, 1945), 8.
Sixteen thousand cipher clerks: Headrick, Invisible Weapon, 223.
Major stations: George Raynor Thompson and Dixie R. Harris, United States Army in World War II: The Technical Services; The Signal Corps (Washington, DC, 1966), 3:607.
“We have got our net”: Ibid., 3:582.
“modern miracle”: Rebecca Robbins Raines, Getting the Message Through: A Branch History of the U.S. Army Signal Corps (Washington, DC, 1996), 262.
Before the invasion of Normandy: Thompson and Harris, Signal Corps, 3:586.
faxing: Ibid., 3:605.
WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT … THIS IS WHAT: Ibid., 3:607.
“nine hundred and ninety”: With Walt Whitman in Camden (Boston, 1906), 3:293.
caused eight to ten times: Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (Cambridge, UK, 2001), 113.
“perhaps the most”: Emory C. Cushing, History of Entomology in World War II (Washington, DC, 1957), 43.
More than 95 percent of the: James Phinney Baxter III, Scientists Against Time (Cambridge, MA, 1946), 307.
fourteen thousand compounds: Paul F. Russell, Man’s Mastery of Malaria (London, 1955), 112–13.
Prisoners, etc.: Baxter, Scientists Against Time, 318.
“complete destruction,” etc.: E. Russell, War and Nature, 136. On DDT, see also David Kinkela, DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide That Changed the World (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011).
dropped 95 percent: E. Russell, War and Nature, 117.
“man has developed”: P. F. Russell, Man’s Mastery, 243.
death rate for all disease: Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier (Washington, DC, 1945), 1.
95 percent of the adult mosquitoes: Cushing, Entomology in World War II, 34.
“completely covered,” etc.: Quoted in Harold W. Thatcher, The Packaging and Packing of Subsistence for the Army (Washington, DC, 1945), 3.
Specialized equipment: J. B. Dow, “How the Navy Uses Standards in Its Electronics Program,” Industrial Standardization, May 1945, 97–99; John C. MacArthur, “Fungus Proofing of CWS Equipment in the Field,” May 20, 1945; folder 470.72; box 54; Entry 2B, Misc. Series, 1942–45; CWS; John Perry, The Story of Standards (New York, 1955), 179; Raines, Getting the Message Through, 263.
20 to 40 percent of the matériel: Russell Jones, “The Packaging Problem,” Army Transportation Journal, August 1946, 6.
“amphibious” packaging: Thatcher, Packaging and Packing, chaps. 2–3; Alvin P. Stauffer, The Quartermaster Corps: Operations in the War Against Japan (Washington, DC, 1956), chap. 7.
Every president after: Maurer and Yu, Big Ditch, chap. 7.
fifteen thousand tons: Tunner, Over the Hump, 159.
“I may be the craziest”: Roger G. Miller, To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949 (Washington, DC, 1998), 23.
“like appointing John Ringling”: Curtis LeMay, quoted in ibid., 46.
“The real excitement”: Tunner, Over the Hump, 162.
The lines did climb: Ibid., 222.
beaming radio broadcasts: The extraordinary story is told in Michael Nelson, War of the Black Heavens: The Battles of Western Broadcasting in the Cold War (Syracuse, NY, 1997).
“When it came to radio,” etc.: Lech Walesa, foreword to ibid., xi.
fire ravaged Baltimore: John Perry, The Story of Standards (New York, 1955), 140–41; Rexmond C. Cochrane, Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards (Washington, DC, 1966), 84–86.
compatibility failures: A. H. Martin Jr., “Diverse Local Standards Bar Free Trade in Many States,” Industrial Standardization, July 1940, 181–92.
College football: “Standard Gauge for Standard Football,” Industrial Standardization, April 1940, 96.
traffic lights: P. G. Agnew, “Consumer Standards on the Way,” Industrial Standardization, February 1940, 45; “How Standards Eliminate Trade Barriers,” Industrial Standardization, April 1940, 86.
“exceedingly rapid”: Lyman J. Gage, “National Standardizing Bureau,” April 18, 1900, reprinted in Science 11 (1900): 698.
“there was quite a discussion”: Quoted in Cochrane, Measures, 84.
Hoover: I’ve relied on Richard Norton Smith, An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (New York, 1984); Kendrick A. Clements, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Imperfect Visionary, 1918–1928 (New York, 2010); and Glen Jeansonne, The Life of Herbert Hoover: Fighting Quaker, 1928–1933 (New York, 2012).
Osages: Louise Morse Whitham, “Herbert Hoover and the Osages,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 25 (1947): 2–4.
Harrison into a college baseball game: Smith, Uncommon Man, 16.
Rain-in-the-Face: WTR, 11:40.
Mr. Cat: Smith, Uncommon Man, 19.
“quieting of hate” … “hushing to ambition” … “meekness”: Herbert Hoover, Memoirs (New York, 1952), 2:158.
turning the lighthouses out: Oscar Straus, quoted in Cochrane, Measures, 229.
bureau developed a system: Described in Clements, Hoover, 255.
brickmakers: Perry, Story of Standards, 132; Clements, Hoover, 111.
Then came new standards: On Hoover’s other standardizations, see Cochrane, Measures, 258.
“sprinkled on practically”: W. C. Stewart, “Serving All Industries!—Bolts and Nuts,” Industrial Standardization, July 1941, 165.
“The screw thread is a simple”: Ralph Flanders, quoted in George S. Case, “What Can Be Done Toward World Unification of Screw Threads?” Standardization, November 1949, 290.
“had to find”: Herbert Hoover, “Crusade for Standards,” Standardization, December 1951, 381.
“Now the half-inch”: Ibid., 282.
imperial system: Aashish Velkar, Markets and Measurements in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York, 2012), 63–66.
nursing in the Philippines: I’m guided by Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, NC, 2003), chap. 2, and Ma. Mercedes G. Planta, “Prerequisites to a Civilized Life: The American Public Health System in the Philippines, 1901 to 1927” (Ph.D. diss., National University of Singapore, 2008).
Nursing wasn’t new: Anastacia Giron-Tupas, History of Nursing in the Philippines, rev. ed. (Manila, 1961), 11–15.
aggressively overwrite: Details from ibid., chap. 3, and Lavinia L. Dock, A History of Nursing: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day with Special Reference to the Work of the Past Thirty Years (New York, 1912), 4:307–20.
more and more nurses from the Philippines: See Choy, Empire of Care; Barbara L. Brush and Julie Sochalski, “International Nurse Migration: Lessons from the Philippines,” Policy, Politics, and Nursing Practice 8 (2007): 37–46; and Barbara L. Brush, “The Potent Lever of Toil: Nursing Development and Exportation in the Postcolonial Philippines,” American Journal of Public Health 100 (2010): 1572–81.
switched over to the metric system: Hector Vera, “The Social Life of Measures: Metrication in the United States and Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., The New School, 2011), 95.
“Suppose my neighbor’s,” etc.: Roosevelt, Press Conference, December 17, 1940, APP.
0.30-inch cartridges … bombs: M. F. Schoeffel, “Some Adventures in Military Standardization,” Standardization, September 1951, 277.
“frightful commentary”: J. B. Carswell, “Postwar Standardization,” Industrial Standardization, October 1944, 211.
“We can’t borrow parts”: Benjamin Melnitsky, Profiting from Industrial Standardization (New York, 1953), 42.
$600 million sending spare screws: Ralph E. Flanders, “How Big Is an Inch?” Atlantic Monthly, January 1951, 45.
$84 million to establish: Edward R. Stettinius Jr., Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory (New York, 1944), chap. 5.
U.S. Army also adopted: Schoeffel, “Adventures,” 277.
By the war’s end: Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy, 1940–1943 (Washington, DC, 1955), 5.
“the integration”: Howard Coonley and P. G. Agnew, “The Role of Standards in the System of Free Enterprise,” Industrial Standardization, April 1941, part 2, 12.
Fenn Manufacturing: W. L. Fenn, “Standards Smooth the Path of the Subcontractor,” Industrial Standardization, June 1942, 163.
7.5 times larger: Cochrane, Measures, appendix F.
15 percent of Australia’s national income: Charles A. Willoughby and John Chamberlain, MacArthur: 1941–1951 (New York, 1954), 71.
Australian agriculture: My account is from Alvin P. Stauffer, The Quartermaster Corps: Operations in the War Against Japan (Washington, DC, 1956), chap. 5.
“Almost every phase”: K. R. Cramp, 1945, quoted in Michael Symons, One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia, 2d ed. (Melbourne, 2007), 187.
“Without any inhibitions”: John Curtin, quoted in Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (1950; Boston, 1985), 4:7.
standards coordinating committee: “United Nations Standards Committee Opens New York Office,” Industrial Standardization, October 1944, 209–10.
For nearly two weeks: Meeting described in various articles in Industrial Standardization, especially “British Mission and American Groups Confer on Screw Thread Standards,” December 1943, 364–65, and John Gaillard, “New War Standard for American Truncated Whitworth Threads,” July 1944, 129–31.
longer summit: See December 1944 issue of Industrial Standardization.
“unending stream”: Robert M. Gates, “How British and American Screw Threads Differ,” Industrial Standardization, December 1944, 246.
conference in Ottawa: “‘Inch’ Screw Thread Practice Unified,” February 1946, Industrial Standardization, 36–42.
“beaten the gun”: Case, “Unification of Screw Threads,” 304.
60 percent of the industrialized world’s economic production: Daniel J. Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York, 2015), 15.
“America is our largest”: Quoted in Roger E. Gay, “World Significance of Standardization,” Industrialization, September 1952, 305.
fighter planes … “a British stretcher”: William L. Batt, “Europe Discovers America,” Standardization, January 1953, 8. On NATO, see also Willard L. Thorp, “Standards and International Relations,” in National Standards in a Modern Economy, ed. Dickson Reck (New York, 1956), 343–51.
leading British standards journal: “British Consider U.S. Views,” Standardization, June 1953, 179.
The Third World: The process by which poorer countries adopted the standards of richer ones is described in Lal C. Verman, Standardization: A New Discipline (Hamden, CT, 1973), 166–67, and Lal C. Verman, “India Reports Active Program,” Industrial Standardization, September 1948, 122–24.
“smoothing the flow,” etc.: Truman to George F. Hussey, May 21, 1952, reprinted in “Welcome to ISO from the President of the United States,” Standardization, September 1952, 269.
440 hertz: Bruce Haynes, A History of Performing Pitch: The Story of “A” (Lanham, MD, 2002), 360–61; “What’s the Pitch, Boys?” Standardization, April 1949, 101–102; and Perry, Story of Standards, 120.
“we now think in terms”: H. E. Hilts, “International Signs for the World’s Traffic,” Standardization, August 1953, 239.
yellow octagon: Clay McShane, “The Origins and Globalization of Traffic Control Signals,” Journal of Urban History 25 (1999): 382; H. Gene Hawkins Jr., “Evolution of the MUTCD: Early Standards for Traffic Control Devices,” ITE Journal, July 1992, 24.
changed its mind: H. Gene Hawkins Jr., “Evolution of the MUTCD: The MUTCD Since World War II,” ITE Journal, November 1992, 18.
56 percent of mainlanders: John Bemelmans Marciano, Whatever Happened to the Metric System?: How America Kept Its Feet (New York, 2014), 243. Awareness rose in the 1970s as the federal government moved to convert to metric, but that conversion was never complete.
sole holdouts against: Vera, “Social Life of Measures,” 60–61. Palau, the FSM, and the RMI were formerly part of the United States’ strategic trust territory in Micronesia.
convened a grand meeting: Some background on the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals is in E. W. Foell, “Traffic Signs Baffling the World Over,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1970.
91 percent of the world’s population: Thanks to the intrepid Callie Leone for help in producing this figure.
“domination without”: George Marion, Bases and Empire: A Chart of American Expansion (New York, 1948), chap. 12.
great coordinating process: A point developed cogently in Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, CA, 2003).
“flat”: Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005).
“broken English”: William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606–1646, ed. William T. Davis (1651; New York, 1908), 135. On Squanto, I’ve relied on Neil Salisbury, “Squanto: Last of the Patuxets,” in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley, CA, 1981), 228–46.
“special instrument”: Bradford, History, 111.
polyglot crazy quilt: On eighteenth-century language, I’ve used Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Others Characters in the Newly United States (New York, 2002); Marc Shell, ed., American Babel: Literatures of the United States from Abnaki to Zuni (Cambridge, MA, 2002); and Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire,” in Formations of United States Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein (Durham, NC, 2014), 335–60.
tongues cut out: Marc Shell, “Babel in America,” in American Babel, 4.
traces of African idioms: African survivals are most discernible in Gullah, spoken to this day on the Sea Islands and the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. But Gullah is a creole based on English, not an African language.
“We shall break up”: Richard Henry Pratt, quoted in Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln, NE, 2009), 27.
Students caught speaking: Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln, NE, 1988), 28.
bribes, threats, etc.: Practices described in Jacobs, White Mother, chap. 4.
“They beat”: Nora Marks Dauenhauer and Richard Dauenhauer, “Technical, Emotional, and Ideological Issues in Reversing Language Shift: Examples from Southeast Alaska,” in Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response, ed. Lenore A. Grenoble and Lindsay J. Whaley (Cambridge, UK, 1998), 65.
Chamoru: Sharleen J. Q. Santos-Bamba, “The Literate Lives of Chamorro Women in Modern Guam” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 2010), chap. 5.
Chamoru dictionaries: Jack Fahy, special assistant to the secretary, “Preliminary Report of Naval Administration of Island Possessions,” April 15, 1945, 8; “Pacific Planning” folder; box 156; R-0-40, Administrative, World War; Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907–1951; ROT.
Virgin Islands: William W. Boyer, America’s Virgin Islands: A History of Human Rights and Wrongs (Durham, NC, 1983), 182.
“cardinal point”: Fred Atkinson, quoted in Funie Hsu, “Colonial Articulations: English Instruction and the ‘Benevolence’ of U.S. Overseas Expansion in the Philippines, 1898–1916” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2013), 20.
“I am astounded,” etc.: Speech, December 20, 1947, recorded in Jack West, report on Albizu, May 4, 1948, 34–35, Albizu FBI File, section 5, box 2.
“by teachers”: Ford Report, 1913, quoted in Cristina Evangelista Torres, The Americanization of Manila, 1898–1921 (Quezon City, 2010), 154. On this, see also Vicente L. Rafael’s insightful Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (Durham, NC, 2016).
former governor: Origins of the Philippine Republic: Extracts from the Diaries and Records of Francis Burton Harrison, ed. Michael P. Onorato (Ithaca, NY, 1974), 117.
“with a left-handed”: Robert H. Gore, quoted in Thomas Mathews, Puerto Rican Politics and the New Deal (Gainesville, FL, 1960), 64.
Teachers there: Solsiree del Moral, Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of the Schools in Puerto Rico, 1898–1952 (Madison, WI, 2013), 16.
roughly a quarter: 27.8 percent in Puerto Rico, 26.6 percent in the Philippines. Amílcar Antonio Barreto, The Politics of Language in Puerto Rico (Gainesville, FL, 2001), 21; Andrew B. Gonzalez, Language and Nationalism: The Philippine Experience Thus Far (Quezon City, 1980), 26.
polyglot pidgin: John E. Reinecke, “‘Pidgin English’ in Hawaii: A Local Study of the Sociology of Language,” American Journal of Sociology 5 (1938): 778–89.
scientific conferences: Michael D. Gordin, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (Chicago, 2015), 180.
Woodrow Wilson: Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, MD, 2005), 34.
tried to learn Osage: Louise Morse Whitham, “Herbert Hoover and the Osages,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 25 (1947): 3.
used Mandarin: Herbert Hoover, Memoirs (New York, 1951), 1:36.
“It was then,” etc.: Mario Pei, One Language for the World (New York, 1958), 31–32.
“The empires of the future,” etc.: “Anglo-American Unity,” September 6, 1943, in Winston S. Churchill, His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James (New York, 1974), 7:6826.
“underhanded orthography”: Gordin, Scientific Babel, 205.
Basic’s champions: W. Terrence Gordon, “C. K. Ogden’s Basic English,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 45 (1988): 339.
“In Basic”: Alok Rai, Orwell and the Politics of Despair: A Critical Study of the Writings of George Orwell (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 125–26.
“spread like wildfire,” etc.: H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (New York, 1934), 417.
“The majority of Chinese,” etc.: I. A. Richards, Basic in Teaching: East and West (London, 1935), 45.
Chinese government to agree: Rodney Koeneke, Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979 (Stanford, CA, 2004), 5.
“It takes only”: “Globalingo,” Time, December 31, 1945, 48.
“has tremendous merit”: FDR to Cordell Hull, June 5, 1944, FDR Library, docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/t335k03.html.
“blood, work” … “Seriously”: FDR to Churchill, June 1944, FDR Library, docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/psf/box37/a335k01.html.
“The Koreans”: Chad Walsh, “Basic English: World Language or World Philosophy,” College English 6 (1945): 456.
dozens of schemes: Pei, One Language, 119; Edmund Vincent Starrett, “Spelling Reform Proposals for the English Language” (Ed.D. diss., Wayne State University, 1981).
Owen: Narcissa Owen, A Cherokee Woman’s America: Memoirs of Narcissa Owen, 1831–1907 (Gainesville, FL, 2005), 97.
On December 7/8, 1941: Global Alphabet: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 79th Cong., 1st sess., November 7, 1945 (Washington, DC, 1945), 6.
“by which we can”: “Former Senator Owen Devises Global Alphabet,” New York Herald Tribune, July 29, 1943.
“the conversational language” … compatible with Basic: Global Alphabet, 65, 4.
FDR passed the scheme: Ibid., 48.
“I do not think”: Carl Hatch, quoted in ibid., 11.
Shaw: Starrett, “Spelling Reform,” 260–61.
Eleanor Roosevelt: Mario Pei, The Story of English (Philadelphia, 1952), 314.
special typewriter: “Appeal for Global Alphabet Made,” Baltimore Evening Sun, December 18, 1946.
“sign of slavery”: M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings (New York, 2009), 102.
“psychological violence” … mission school: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London, 1986), 9, 11.
“When I travel” … “Did you ever” … “a language” … “a national soul”: Quezon, speech, November 7, 1937, in The Great Quezon’s Dream: A National Language for the Filipinos, 4–5, typescript, in AHC. Language in the Philippines is best approached through Rafael, Motherless Tongues.
Basic Tagalog: “Eureka! Basic Tagalog!” Manila Evening News, January 17, 1946.
“decadent” subject: Pei, Story of English, 347.
“only provisionally”: Quoted in Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford, UK, 1992), 27.
“wreck all hopes”: Quoted in ibid., 167.
some linguists have insisted: The argument is made best in Phillipson’s Linguistic Imperialism and Diana Lemberg, “‘The Universal Language of the Future’: Decolonization, Development, and the American Embrace of Global English, 1945–1965,” Modern Intellectual History 15 (2018): 561–592.
foreign students: Paul A. Kramer, “Is the World Our Campus?: International Students and U.S. Global Power in the Long Twentieth Century,” DH 33 (2009): 792.
forty U.S. government agencies: Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism, 157.
instrument of “Western psychological”: Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York, 1965), 248.
“Special English”: Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language (New York, 2009), 141–42.
priority on language export: Phillipson’s interviews with governmental officials clarify this. See Linguistic Imperialism, 310.
It wasn’t until 1965: National Security Action Memorandum 332, 1965, discussed in Lemberg, “Universal Language,” 587.
from the bottom up: See especially David Crystal, English as a Global Language, 2d ed. (New York, 2003), and David Northrup, How English Became the Global Language (New York, 2013).
quarter of the population: 26.1 percent speaking English by 1950: Barreto, Politics of Language, 21.
compulsion rarely comes from: The case is made cogently in David Singh Grewal, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization (New Haven, CT, 2008).
“Speaking frankly,” etc.: Masaaki Morita, quoted in Genryu, the 50th-anniversary history of Sony, translated and abbreviated at sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory.
Gromyko: Pei, One Language, 51.
70 percent of the world’s passenger miles: Jenifer Van Vleck, Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 170.
Francophones in Quebec: Sandford F. Borins, The Language of the Skies: The Bilingual Air Traffic Control Conflict in Canada (Montreal, 1983). Three years after the strike, the government relented and allowed French to be used in limited circumstances.
scientists: My account of science—both its pursuit of international languages and its succumbing to English—is derived from Gordin, Scientific Babel.
Nobel Prizes: Counting prizes in physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine and using laureate biographies from www
half of publications: Ulrich Ammon, “Linguistic Inequality and Its Effects on Participation in Scientific Discourse and on Global Knowledge Accumulation,” Applied Linguistics Review 3 (2012): 338.
well over 90 percent: Ibid.
Hebrew University’s: I counted refereed papers or those intended for peer review on faculty websites linked at www
82.3 percent of randomly chosen websites: David Crystal, Language and the Internet (New York, 2001), 217.
ASCII: Daniel Pargman and Jacob Palme, “ASCII Imperialism,” in Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life, ed. Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star (Ithaca, NY, 2009), 177–99.
QWERTY: The long shadow cast by that English-language typewriter over global information processing is discussed brilliantly in Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (Cambridge, MA, 2017).
“It is the ultimate act,” etc.: Crystal, Global Language, 117.
“a major risk”: Quoted in “The Coming Global Tongue,” The Economist, December 21, 1996, 75.
60 percent of the world’s radio: Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (New York, 2000), 18.
language of Esperanto: Mario Pei, Wanted: A World Language (New York, 1969).
“bitter truth,” etc.: Manu Joseph, “India Faces a Linguistic Truth: English Spoken Here,” NYT, February 16, 2011. On the general trend, see Joshua A. Fishman, Andrew W. Conrad, and Alma Rubal-Lopez, eds., Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940–1990 (Berlin, 1996).
“Investors will not”: Goh Chok Tong, quoted in Phyllis Ghim-Lian Chew, Emergent Lingua Francas and World Orders: The Politics and Place of English as a World Language (New York, 2009), 141.
call-center workers: Funie Hsu, “The Coloniality of Neoliberal English: The Enduring Structures of American Colonial English Instruction in the Philippines and Puerto Rico,” L2 Journal 7 (2015): 124, 139–40.
Mongolia: Nicholas Ostler, The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (New York, 2010), 15.
hundred thousand native speakers: Daniel Goodard, “Teaching English Abroad Is an Increasingly Popular Choice for Struggling Undergraduates,” The Independent, November 19, 2012.
“If the Chinese”: John McWhorter, “Where Do Languages Go to Die?” The Atlantic, September 10, 2015, www
language with the most native speakers: Language rankings from “Summary by Language Size,” Ethnologue, www
roughly one in four: Crystal, Global Language, 69.
study commissioned by the British Council: Robert Pinon and John Haydon, The Benefits of English Language for Individuals and Societies: Quantitative Indicators from Cameroon, Nigeria, Rwanda, Bangladesh, and Pakistan (London, 2010), 11.
lingual frenectomies … “English is now”: Kathy Marks, “Seoul Tries to Shock Parents out of Linguistic Surgery,” The Independent, January 3, 2004.
Modern Language Association: David Goldberg, Dennis Looney, and Natalia Lusin, “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education,” 26, Modern Language Association, February 2015, apps.mla.org/pdf/2013_enrollment_survey.pdf.
“It’s embarrassing”: Maria Gavrilovic, “Obama: ‘I Don’t Speak a Foreign Language. It’s Embarrassing!’” CBS News, July 11, 2008, cbsnews.com.
Rumors floated: Ivar Bryce, You Only Live Once: Memories of Ian Fleming (London, 1975), 68. On Fleming, see also Matthew Parker, Goldeneye, Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica (New York, 2015).
“behind the curtains”: Stanley Ross, Axel Wenner-Gren: The Sphinx of Sweden (New York, 1947), 1. A more sober account is Ilja A. Luciak, “Vision and Reality: Axel Wenner-Gren, Paul Fejos, and the Origins of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research,” Current Anthropology 57 (2016): S302–S332.
“He is too big,” etc.: Quoted in Ross, Wenner-Gren, 3.
science and rationality: Axel Wenner-Gren, Call to Reason: An Appeal to Common Sense (New York, 1938).
Anglic: “Anglic Urged as World Tongue,” Albuquerque Journal, December 8, 1931.
“I have not a shred”: Sumner Welles, quoted in Luciak, “Vision and Reality,” S314.
“perfect example”: Scott Farris, Inga: Kennedy’s Great Love, Hitler’s Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover’s Prime Suspect (Guilford, CT, 2016), 137.
J. Edgar Hoover: Farris notes that the recordings of Kennedy and Arvad having sex were likely lost by the 1960s but that Hoover nevertheless took pains to assure Kennedy that he was keeping the file on the pair “safe.” See Inga, 240–42.
“When we have won”: Bryce, You Only Live Once, 72.
“blessed corners”: Quoted in Tao Leigh Goffe, “007 Versus the Darker Races: The Black and Yellow Peril in Dr. No,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 12 (2015): 1.
“In the whole”: Quoted in Parker, Goldeneye, 212.
Blackwell’s young son: Mark Binelli, “Chris Blackwell: The Barefoot Mogul,” Men’s Journal, March 2014, www
“too posh”: Edward Helmore, “Chris Blackwell: The Original Trustafarian,” London Telegraph, May 8, 2012.
“Bond prepared” … “Bitten off”: Ian Fleming, Doctor No (1958; New York, 2002), 53.
“the most valuable” … “I can bend”: Ibid., 175, 178.
“Who in the world”: Ibid., 161–62.
“no sovereign or territorial”: Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York, 1994), 200.
A consultation of the records: Ibid., 216.
“Are we in an acquisitive”: Ernest Gruening, Many Battles: The Autobiography of Ernest Gruening (New York, 1973), 235. On the 1930s recolonization of the equatorial guano islands, see Roy F. Nichols, Advance Agents of American Destiny (Philadelphia, 1956), chap. 9; Lowell T. Young, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and America’s Islets: Acquisition of Territory in the Caribbean and the Pacific,” The Historian 35 (1973): 205–20; Skaggs, Guano Rush, chap. 11; and Under a Jarvis Moon, dir. Noelle Kahanu and Heather Giugni (Bishop Museum, 2011).
“maintain the sovereignty”: Ernest Gruening, “General Information, Equatorial Islands,” c. 1939; “World’s Colonies—General” folder; box 607; 9-0-1, Administrative, World’s Colonies; Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907–1951; ROT.
“Because of their adaptability”: Ibid.
deposited in small groups: Details in Interior Department press memos, 1938, in “Colonization—Other Islands” folder, box 12, Padover File.
“I am instructed”: Gruening, Many Battles, 236.
Howland Island: William Atherton DuPuy, “Our New Islands,” Current History, February 1937, 62–64.
eight hundred such bases: David Vine offers this reasonable estimate in Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York, 2015), 4.
pointillist’s brush: My notion of a pointillist empire derives from William Rankin’s discussion of “territorial pointillism” in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016) and the insights of Ruth Oldenziel in her chapter “Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire,” in Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War, ed. Gabrielle Hecht (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 13–42. The “bases are the new form of empire” historical literature was sparked by Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York, 1999). See also the ensuing historical scholarship cited in Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” DH 40 (2016): 390n.
“storm of comment”: CDA 359, “American Opinion of ‘Trusteeship’ for Pacific Bases,” November 1945, 5, Notter Records, box 126.
“maintain the military bases”: Truman, Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference, August 9, 1945, APP.
“We seek no territorial”: George Marion, Bases and Empire: A Chart of American Expansion (New York, 1948), 11.
“vivisection”: Quoted in Amílcar Antonio Barreto, Vieques, the Navy, and Puerto Rican Politics (Gainesville, FL, 2002), 24.
“We are the lamb”: Alba Encarnación, quoted in ibid., 40.
On Guam: Department of Defense, Base Structure Report, Fiscal Year 2015 Baseline, 42.
something similar in Alaska: John S. Whitehead, Completing the Union: Alaska, Hawai‘i, and the Battle for Statehood (Albuquerque, NM, 2004), 277–78.
“The military doesn’t have”: Quoted in Vine, Base Nation, 75.
“relatively small”: Quoted in ibid., 65. Stuart Barber and the strategic island concept are also discussed in David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton, NJ, 2009), chaps. 2–3.
“The Yankees”: Benjamín Torres, ed., Pedro Albizu Campos: Obras escogidas, 1923–1936 (San Juan, 1975), 271.
cable traffic: Reprinted in Daniel C. Walsh, An Air War with Cuba: The United States Radio Campaign Against Castro (Jefferson, NC, 2012), 17.
“pigs” … “a queer” … “a cage”: “Swans, Spooks, and Boobies,” Time, December 6, 1971.
fifty million regular listeners: James McCartney, “Radio on Swan Island an Outpost of Free Cuba,” Boston Globe, April 23, 1961.
cryptic messages: “Swans, Spooks, and Boobies.”
journalists snickered: David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, Our Invisible Government (New York, 1964), 329.
Fleming’s advice: Christopher Moran, “Ian Fleming and CIA Director Allen Dulles: The Very Best of Friends,” in James Bond in World and Popular Culture: The Films Are Not Enough, 2d ed., ed. Robert G. Weiner, B. Lynn Whitfield, and Jack Becker (Newcastle, UK, 2011), 208–15.
CIA still found uses: Sam Dillon, Comandos: The CIA and Nicaragua’s Contra Rebels (New York, 1991), 177–82.
“powdered white” … “screaming lungs”: Fleming, Doctor No, 214, 211.
“We just took out”: Quoted in Sasha Davis, The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Athens, GA, 2015), 61.
“We will gladly”: Carey Wilson, dir., Bikini: The Atom Island (MGM, 1946).
“We didn’t know”: Interviewed in Robert Stone, dir., Radio Bikini (IFC Films, 1988).
staged reenactment: Peter Bacon Hales, Outside the Gates of Eden: The Dream of America from Hiroshima to Now (Chicago, 2014), chap. 1.
“all nations have yielded”: Paul V. McNutt, Address at the Inauguration of the Philippine Republic, July 4, 1946; “McNutt, P. V., Correspondence and Speeches, 1945–46” folder, box 7, HC–DC.
detonated sixty-six more: Dick Thornburgh et al., “The Nuclear Claims Tribunal of the Republic of the Marshall Islands: An Independent Examination and Assessment of Its Decision-Making Processes,” 2003, www
90 percent of the populations: Davis, Empires’ Edge, 53.
National Cancer Institute: Simon L. Steven et al., “Radiation Doses and Cancer Risks in the Marshall Islands Associated with Exposure to Radioactive Fallout from Bikini and Enewetak Nuclear Weapons Tests: Summary,” Health Physics 99 (2010): 105–24.
“catastrophic nonsense”: Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–70 (Stanford, CA, 1997), 14.
“We have no prudent”: “12 Scientists Ask Bomb Tests Go On,” NYT, October 21, 1956.
“There are only 90,000”: Davis, Empires’ Edge, 86. Kissinger’s population estimate was considerably inflated.
a nation that very much gave a damn: My account draws on two articles: George O. Totten and Tamio Kawakami, “Gensuikyō and the Peace Movement in Japan,” Asia Survey 4 (1964): 833–41, and Toshihiro Higuchi, “An Environmental Origin of Antinuclear Activism in Japan, 1954–63: The Government, the Grassroots Movement, and the Politics of Risk,” Peace and Change, 33 (2008): 333–67.
the director Ishirō Honda: The following discussion derives from Yuki Tanaka, “Godzilla and the Bravo Shot: Who Killed and Created the Monster?” in Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb, ed. Robert Jacobs (Lanham, MD, 2010), 159–70.
“emitting high levels” … “If nuclear testing”: Gojira, dir. Ishirō Honda (Toho, 1954).
“The menace was”: Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, dir. Terry Morse (Transworld, 1956).
front lines of nuclear confrontation: Details on nuclear weapon storage from Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons, July 1945 Through September 1977, 1978, www
“New Thule”: Deneen L. Brown, “Trail of Frozen Tears: The Cold War Is Over, but to Native Greenlanders Displaced by It, There’s Still No Peace,” Washington Post, October 22, 2002.
“tantamount to suicide”: Nikolai Bulganin to H. C. Hansen, March 28, 1957, quoted in Nikolaj Petersen, “The H. C. Hansen Paper and Nuclear Weapons in Greenland,” Scandinavian Journal of History 23 (1998): 32. See also Danish Institute of International Affairs, Greenland During the Cold War: Danish and American Security Policy, 1945–68, trans. Henry Myers (Copenhagen, 1997).
“no-nuclear” principle: Petersen, “H. C. Hansen Paper,” 33.
“one of the first ones”: Thomas Power, 1950, quoted in Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 170.
a B-52 flying near Thule: History and Research Division, Headquarters, Strategic Air Command, Project Crested Ice: The Thule Nuclear Accident, vol. 1, SAC Historical Study 113, 1969; Sagan, Limits of Safety, chap. 4.
“one-point safe”: Excellent discussions of these issues are in Sagan, Limits of Safety, chap. 4, and Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York, 2013).
seventy-five tankers: Calculated from figures for phases 1 and 2 given in Project Crested Ice, 24, 56.
village of Palomares: Details from Tad Szulc, The Bombs of Palomares (New York, 1967).
“all the makings”: “The Missing H-Bomb,” Boston Globe, March 4, 1966.
“just the way”: “¡La Bomba Recuperada!” Time, April 15, 1966, 35.
“narrow the range” … “Airstrip One”: George Orwell, 1984 (1949; New York, 1984), 53, 186.
“cold war”: George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” November 19, 1945, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston, 2000), 4:9.
Burtonwood: Details from Aldon P. Ferguson, Eighth Air Force Base Air Depot Burtonwood (Reading, UK, 1986). Burtonwood was briefly closed as a U.S. base in the 1960s.
“occupiers” … “coca-colonization”: Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA, 1993).
postwar Panama: Thomas L. Pearcy, We Answer Only to God: Politics and the Military in Panama, 1903–1947 (Albuquerque, NM, 1998), 175.
“Well, we did not”: Thomas S. Power, Design for Survival (New York, 1965), 132; Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (New York, 2013), 188.
Within months, more than five thousand: Ken Kolsbun, Peace: The Biography of a Symbol (Washington, DC, 2008), 41, 43.
“I was in despair”: Gerald Holtom, “A Prelude to the Dance of Life,” quoted in Andrew Rigby, “A Peace Symbol’s Origins,” Peace Review 10 (1998): 477. Another story is that Holtom’s design combined the semaphore signs for N and D: nuclear disarmament.
“such a puny”: Ibid.
five hundred bands: Bill Harry, Bigger Than the Beatles (Liverpool, 2009), 9.
“that Liverpool”: George Martin, Summer of Love: The Making of Sgt. Pepper (New York, 1994), 41.
1,636 buildings: Ferguson, Burtonwood, 103, 88, 96.
“shoddy, shameful”: Ibid., 81.
official contracts: Ibid., 97. The case for the Beatles as a base band is ably made in Keith Gildart, Images of England Through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock ’n’ Roll, 1955–1976 (New York, 2013), chap. 3. On Burtonwood and music, see also Harry, Bigger Than the Beatles, 45, and Helen Southall, “‘Total War’: Effects of World War II on the Live Music Industry in Cheshire and North Wales,” in World War II and the Media, ed. Christopher Hart, Guy Hodgson, and Simon Gwyn Roberts (Chester, UK, 2014), 137–53.
“brought their culture” … “an absolute magnet”: Martin, Summer of Love, 42.
Ringo’s stepfather: Brian Roylance, ed., The Beatles Anthology (San Francisco, 2000), 35.
John and Paul … George got his records: Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography (New York, 2005), 27, 55, 110, 123.
McCartney appeared on: Lawrence S. Wittner, Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–70 (Stanford, CA, 1997), 196.
“Look what they do”: Quoted in Hunter Davies, “The Beatles,” Life, September 20, 1968, 76.
protest and participation: An excellent discussion of this dynamic in the domestic context is Gretchen Heefner, The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland (Cambridge, MA, 2012).
“confused” … “dazed”: Edwin O. Reischauer, The United States and Japan (Cambridge, MA, 1954), 217.
MacArthur ruled: Details, unless otherwise indicated, from John W. Dower’s extraordinary Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York, 1999).
two hundred thousand troops remained: Sarah Kovner, “The Soundproofed Superpower: American Bases and Japanese Communities, 1945–1972,” Journal of Asian Studies 75 (2016): 90, 96.
“bound hand and foot”: Suzuki Mosaburo, quoted in George R. Packard, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton, NJ, 1966), 19.
18 percent of those polled: Justin Jesty, “Tokyo 1960: Days of Rage and Grief: Hamaya Hiroshi’s Photos of Anti-Security-Treaty Protests,” Asia-Pacific Journal 13 (2015): 6.
“a colony”: Thomas R. H. Havens, Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan, 1965–1975 (Princeton, NJ, 1987), 193.
5 percent of its population: Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (Cambridge, UK, 2010), 137.
“incidents and accidents”: Masumichi S. Inoue, Okinawa and the U.S. Military: Identity Making in the Age of Globalization (New York, 2007), 50–51.
more than a hundred Japanese died: Kovner, “Soundproofed Superpower,” 98.
relinquished jurisdiction: Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History (New York, 1997), 316.
$800 million: Richard Stubbs, Rethinking Asia’s Economic Miracle: The Political Economy of War, Prosperity, and Crisis (New York, 2005), 68.
“divine aid”: Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York, 1985), 289.
“gift of the gods”: LaFeber, Clash, 287.
“Toyota’s salvation”: Schaller, American Occupation, 289.
Toyota’s output: Fujita Kuniko, “Corporatism and the Corporate Welfare Program: Impact of the Korean War on the Toyota Motor Corporation,” in The Occupation of Japan: The Impact of the Korean War, ed. William F. Nimmo (Norfolk, VA, 1990), 124.
well-paid internship: On the relationship between military contracts, standardization, and Asian growth, I’ve learned much from Jim Glassman and Young-Jin Choi, “The Chaebol and the US Military-Industrial Complex: Cold War Geopolitical Economy and South Korean Industrialization,” Environment and Planning A 46 (2014): 1160–80, and Patrick Chung, “Building Global Capitalism: Militarization, Standardization, and U.S.–South Korea Relations Since the Korean War” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2017).
Deming: My understanding of Deming and his place in Japan is from William M. Tsutsui, “W. Edwards Deming and the Origins of Quality Control in Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 22 (1996): 295–325.
“I never felt”: Andrea Gabor, The Man Who Discovered Quality (New York, 1990), 80.
“patron saint”: Akio Morita, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony (New York, 1986), 165.
Vietnam War helped: Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 98.
fifty-five-fold: Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Stanford, CA, 1982), 6.
Japan’s growth: Important perspectives are Johnson, MITI, and essays by Bruce Cumings and Laura Hein in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley, CA, 1993).
sentiment was profoundly complicated: Details on protests and polls from Kovner, “Soundproofed Superpower,” 94–95, 100.
“contradiction”: Havens, Fire Across the Sea, 194.
serious protests: Details from Packard, Protest in Tokyo.
Okinawan city of Koza: Inoue, Okinawa, 53–55; Miyume Tanji, Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa (London, 2006), 103–104; James E. Roberson, “‘Doin’ Our Thing’: Identity and Colonial Modernity in Okinawan Rock Music,” Popular Music and Society 34 (2011): 593–620.
Yukio Kyan: Roberson, “Doin’ Our Thing,” 606; see also Justin Zaun, “It’s Only Rock and Roll,” Okinawa Living, October 2004, 10–17.
“little future” … “cheap imitations”: Michael Schaller, Altered States: The United States and Japanese Since the Occupation (New York, 1997), 3.
Ibuka set up shop: My account of Sony is from Nick Lyons, The Sony Vision (New York, 1976); Akio Morita, From a 500-Dollar Company to a Global Corporation (Pittsburgh, 1985); Morita, Made in Japan; John Nathan, Sony: The Private Life (Boston, 1999); and Genryu, the 50th-anniversary history of Sony, translated and abbreviated at sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory.
“Yankee Alley”: Nathan, Sony, 15.
“The Americans had brought”: Morita, Made in Japan, 51.
stocked a library: Hyungsub Choi, “Manufacturing Knowledge in Transit: Technical Practice, Organizational Change, and the Rise of the Semiconductor Industry in the United States and Japan, 1948–1960” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins, 2007), 109–10. Morita writes that Sony cooked “oxalic ferrite” to make ferric oxide (Made in Japan, 56). This seems to be a slightly garbled translation of ferrous oxalate.
“could be recognized”: Morita, Made in Japan, 70.
“thought of ourselves”: Ibid.
“We were little boys”: Morita, 500-Dollar Company, 223.
“Sony Boy”: Sony Boy still would have been read in Japan as Japanese.
“like priceless art”: Spitz, Beatles, 35.
The trade balance: Aaron Forsberg, America and the Japanese Miracle: The Cold War Context of Japan’s Postwar Economic Revival, 1950–60 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 10.
“colonial” … “We ship her”: Jerry Brown, quoted in M. J. Heale, “Anatomy of a Scare: Yellow Peril Politics in America, 1980–1993,” Journal of American Studies 43 (2009): 23. See also Andrew C. McKevitt, Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2017).
closed forty assembly plants: Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies (New Haven, CT, 2010), 252–59.
“I’m proud”: Gabor, Man Who Discovered Quality, 126.
“Imagine, a few years”: Quoted in Andrea Chronister, “Japan-Bashing: How Propaganda Shapes Americans’ Perceptions of the Japanese” (M.A. thesis, Lehigh University, 1992), 74.
Trump on television: The Oprah Winfrey Show, ABC, April 25, 1988. Trump’s complaints extended to the nations of the Persian Gulf, too.
“It’s because of you”: Who Killed Vincent Chin?, dir. Christine Choy (Film News Now Foundation, 1987).
Time started reporting: Time, May 10, 1971.
“Let’s become a Japan”: Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan That Can Say No: The New U.S.–Japan Relations (Ann Arbor, MI, 1989), 36. Translation published without Morita’s permission.
“few mud huts”: Lloyd Hamilton, 1934, quoted in Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (London, 2009), 54.
“friendly and energetic”: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York, 2007), 65.
Awadh bin Laden: In my account of the Bin Laden family, I’ve leaned heavily on Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century (New York, 2008). Details from that book unless otherwise cited.
“an immense aircraft”: Ibid., 42.
consulate at Dhahran: Parker T. Hart, Saudi Arabia and the United States: Birth of a Security Partnership (Bloomington, IN, 1998), 31–32, 85.
largest concentration: Vitalis, America’s Kingdom, 34.
“just like a bit of U.S.A.”: Mary Eddy, 1954, quoted in ibid., 80.
Voice of the Arabs: Hart, Saudi Arabia and the U.S., 82–85.
“It’ll be over”: Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton, NJ, 2011), 199.
“finally sow shit”: Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (London, 2001), 69.
hundred tons of heavy construction equipment … tunnels, etc.: Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, trans. James Howarth (London, 2005), 48; Wright, Looming Tower, 114.
“The myth of the superpower”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 48.
Within four hours: Richard P. Hallion, Storm over Iraq: Air Power and the Gulf War (Washington, DC, 1992), 134.
“There are no caves,” etc.: Dialogue reported in Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York, 2004), 223.
“After the danger” … “I would hope so”: Bob Woodward, The Commanders (New York, 1991), 270.
“Come with all” … “Come as fast”: Wright, Looming Tower, 157.
“everything aloft”: Colin Powell, My American Journey (New York, 1995), 468.
ten times the size of the Berlin Airlift: Hallion, Storm over Iraq, 138.
“You could have walked”: Ibid., 137.
Iraq had seized Kuwait: Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Revolution in Warfare?: Air Power in the Persian Gulf (Annapolis, MD, 1995), 7–9.
fourth largest … sixth largest: Hallion, Storm over Iraq, 128.
“about getting kicked”: H. Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero (New York, 1992), 332.
triumph through airpower: On airpower in Vietnam and Desert Storm, I’ve been guided by Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA, 2006), chaps. 6–7.
5 million tons … 250 pounds: Christian G. Appy, American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York, 2015), 229.
Thanh Hóa Bridge: Walter J. Boyne, “Breaking the Dragon’s Jaw,” Air Force Magazine, August 2011, 60.
Operation Desert Storm: My account is from Hallion, Storm over Iraq; Michael J. Mazarr, Don M. Snider, and James A. Blackwell Jr., Desert Storm: The Gulf War and What We Learned (Boulder, CO, 1993); and Benjamin S. Lambeth, “Air Power, Space Power, and Geography,” Journal of Strategic Studies 22 (1999): 63–82.
“You pick precisely”: Mazarr et al., Desert Storm, 96.
GPS-guided charge: On the use of GPS, see Michael Russell Rip and James M. Hasik, The Precision Revolution: GPS and the Future of Aerial Warfare (Annapolis, MD, 2002), chap. 5.
hadn’t even been necessary: Thomas Mahnken and Barry D. Watts, “What the Gulf War Can (and Cannot) Tell Us About the Future of Warfare,” International Security 22 (1997): 160–61.
“revolution in military affairs”: Useful overviews of the RMA are Eliot A. Cohen, “A Revolution in Warfare,” Foreign Affairs 75 (1996): 37–54, and Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (London, 2000).
“targets and non-targets,” etc.: Quoted in Rip and Hasik, Precision Revolution, 131. I’ve been guided in my understanding of this by William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016), chap. 6.
a touchy subject: Powell, American Journey, 474; Schwarzkopf, Doesn’t Take a Hero, 332–35.
“inadvertently pissed”: Rachel Bronson, Thicker Than Oil: America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia (New York, 2006), 195.
Great efforts were taken: Powell, American Journey, 474; Schwarzkopf, Doesn’t Take a Hero, 332.
“We had to avoid”: Schwarzkopf, Doesn’t Take a Hero, 355.
For Osama bin Laden: On Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the road to 9/11, I’ve relied especially on Bergen, Holy War, Inc.; Coll, Ghost Wars; The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report on the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (Washington, DC, 2004); and Wright, Looming Tower.
“It is unconscionable”: Wright, Looming Tower, 209–10.
“turning the Arabian Peninsula”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 16.
It’s genuinely unclear: The 9/11 Commission Report judged the bombing to be “principally” the work of Saudi Hezbollah but mentioned “signs that al Qaeda played some role” (60).
“You can see,” etc.: Rowan Scarborough, “Air Force Barracks Is Built by Bin Laden’s Family Firm,” Washington Times, September 15, 1998.
first commercially available satellite phones: Coll, Bin Ladens, 467.
“several tens of thousands”: Werner Daum, “Universalism and the West,” Harvard International Review, Summer 2001, 19. Similar estimates are discussed in Noam Chomsky, 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (New York, 2011), 79–80.
“100,000 new fanatics”: “Punish and Be Damned,” The Economist, August 27, 1998, 16.
“a military base” … “It wasn’t a children’s school”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 119.
“To us, Afghanistan”: 9/11 Commission Report, 340.
“Your forces” … “You spread” … “Is there a worse”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 163, 167.
“rid the world”: “Bush Vows to Rid the World of ‘Evil-Doers,’” CNN, September 16, 2001, edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.bush.terrorism.
“I just don’t think”: Presidential Debate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, October 11, 2001, APP.
Rumsfeld estimated: Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (New York, 2011), 400.
122 U.S. service members: Terry H. Anderson, Bush’s Wars (New York, 2011), 136.
“very new type” … “We’ll have to”: “Text: Pentagon Briefing on Military Response to Terrorist Attacks,” Washington Post, September 18, 2001.
metaphor of the network: A helpful exploration is Stuart Elden, Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty (Minneapolis, 2009).
“Taliban-plinking”: Benjamin S. Lambeth, Air Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom (Santa Monica, CA, 2005), 95–96.
“The planes” … “The American forces”: Lawrence, Messages to the World, 182.
Drones have killed: Figures discussed in Chris Woods, “Understanding the Gulf Between Public and U.S. Government Estimates of Civilian Casualties in Covert Drone Strikes,” in Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict: Ethical, Legal, and Strategic Implications, ed. David Cortright, Rachel Fairhurst, and Kristen Wall (Chicago, 2015), 186. An excellent guide to drones is Peter L. Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg, eds., Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy (New York, 2015).
“We’re not a colonial”: “Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Al Jazeera,” February 25, 2003, www
“Wizard of Oz moment”: Quoted in Anderson, Bush’s Wars, 141.
“We need to create”: Max Boot, “Washington Needs a Colonial Office,” Financial Times, July 3, 2003.
“a surprisingly inept”: Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York, 2004), 2.
“We’re a liberating power”: “Text of President Bush’s Press Conference,” NYT, April 13, 2004.
“Green Zone”: Rajiv Chandrasekeran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York, 2006).
“We covet no one’s”: Rumsfeld, briefing, November 16, 2001, avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/dod_brief93.asp.
“If we were a true empire”: Eric Schmitt and Mark Landler, “Cheney Calls for More Unity in Fight Against Terrorism,” NYT, January 25, 2004.
“the presence and activities”: Donald H. Rumsfeld, “Positioning Our Military for a Rapidly Changing World,” Seattle Times, September 24, 2004.
kicked out of place after place: On U.S. base closures, see Sasha Davis, The Empires’ Edge: Militarization, Resistance, and Transcending Hegemony in the Pacific (Athens, GA, 2015). On foreign base closures, see Stacie L. Pettyjohn and Jennifer Kavanaugh, Access Granted: Political Challenges to the U.S. Overseas Military Presence, 1945–2014 (Santa Monica, CA, 2016).
Hatoyama: Yuko Kawato, Protests Against U.S. Military Base Policy in Asia: Persuasion and Its Limits (Stanford, CA, 2015), chap. 2.
Many on Guam saw in the base expansion: Frank Quimby, “Fortress Guåhån: Chamorro Nationalism, Regional Economic Integration and US Defence Interests Shape Guam’s Recent History,” Journal of Pacific History 46 (2011): 373.
activists put up determined resistance: Tiara Rose Na‘puti, “Charting Contemporary Chamoru Activism: Anti-Militarization and Social Movements in Guåhan” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 2013).
“This is old-school”: Quimby, “Fortress Guåhån,” 373.
“they are a possession,” etc.: Lieutenant Colonel Douglas, quoted in Ronald Stade, Pacific Passages: World Culture and Local Politics in Guam (Stockholm, 1998), 192–93.
“the dark side” … “It’s going to be vital”: Meet the Press, NBC, September 16, 2001.
those laws didn’t hold: An important overview: Kal Raustiala, Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?: The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law (New York, 2009), chap. 7.
“They are outsourcing”: Maher Arar, quoted in Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York, 2008), 133. See 108–109 for estimates of the scope of extraordinary rendition. On the CIA’s private fleet, see Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (New York, 2006).
“black sites”: A key source is Dana Priest, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons,” Washington Post, November 2, 2005.
a small handful: Despite the prominent controversy, for years only three detainees were known to have been waterboarded. But in 2012 Human Rights Watch interviewed two detainees rendered to Libya who offered credible reports of water torture. In 2014 the Senate Intelligence Committee released a redacted report referring to waterboarding paraphernalia stored at an Afghan detention site that was not a location the CIA had used for the three detainees. See Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya (Washington, DC, 2012); 51; Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, Senate Report 113–288, December 9, 2014, 51n245.
Tinian, Wake, and Midway: Simon Reid-Henry, “Exceptional Sovereignty?: Guantánamo Bay and the Re-Colonial Present,” Antipode 39 (2007): 629.
“foreign territory, not subject”: Patrick F. Philbin and John C. Yoo, “Possible Habeas Jurisdiction over Aliens Held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” December 28, 2001, in The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, ed. Karen J. Greenberg and Joseph L. Dratel (New York, 2005), 37. A useful discussion of Guantánamo Bay as imperial history is Amy Kaplan, “Where Is Guantánamo?,” American Quarterly 57 (2005): 831–58.
“Strawberry Fields”: Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (New York, 2013), 17.
“fully American enclave,” etc.: Amended Petition for Writ of Habeas Corpus, Rasul v. Bush, February 19, 2002, in The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror, ed. Karen J. Greenberg and Joseph L. Dratel (New York, 2008), 21.
“this lease”: Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466, 487 (2004) (Kennedy, J., concurring).
huge garment-manufacturing center: Behind the Labels: Garment Workers on U.S. Saipan, dir. Tessa Lessin (Oxygen, 2001); John Ydstie, “The Abramoff-DeLay-Mariana Islands Connection,” NPR: Weekend Edition, June 17, 2006; Rebecca Clarren, “Paradise Lost: Greed, Sex Slavery, Forced Abortions and Right-Wing Moralists,” Ms., Spring 2006, www
Congress sought to close it: Lessin, Behind the Labels; Clarren, “Paradise Lost.”
He offered junkets: Jack Abramoff, Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption from America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist (Washington, DC, 2011), 77.
The visitors enjoyed: Clarren, “Paradise Lost”; John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy (New York, 2007), 182; 20/20, ABC News, May 24, 1999.
“one of the grand constitutional”: Abramoff, Capitol Punishment, 125.
“You are a shining light” … “You represent”: 20/20, ABC News, May 24, 1999.
“a perfect petri dish” … “It’s like my”: Juliet Eilperin, “A ‘Petri Dish’ in the Pacific,” Washington Post, June 26, 2000.
“The Man Who Bought”: Time, cover, January 8, 2006.
“my hangman”: Abramoff, Capitol Punishment, 175.
“out of the limits”: Citizenship Act of 1934, 48 Stat. 797.
“the citizenship of persons”: House Report 75–1303, quoted in Gabriel J. Chin, “Why Senator John McCain Cannot Be President: Eleven Months and a Hundred Yards Short of Citizenship,” Michigan Law Review First Impressions 107 (2008), 7.
“eleven months and”: Ibid.
Palin made no secret: Tom Kizzia, “Yup’ik Ties Give Palins Unique Alaska Connection,” Seattle Times, October 23, 2008.
member of the Alaskan Independence Party: Kate Zernike, “A Palin Joined Alaskan Third Party, Just Not Sarah Palin,” NYT, September 3, 2008.
“Alaska was no different,” etc.: Lynette Clark, interviewed in Lisa Karpova, “Alaska Independence Movement,” Pravda, April 20, 2008, www
“Your party plays,” etc.: Sarah Palin, Address to the Alaskan Independence Party Convention, 2008, youtu.be/ZwvPNXYrIyI.
“very strong weakness,” etc.: Mark Penn, “Weekly Strategic Review on Hillary Clinton for President Campaign,” March 19, 2007, posted at www
“near staff revolt”: Kyle Cheney, “No, Clinton Didn’t Start the Birther Thing. This Guy Did,” Politico, September 16, 2016, www
They circulated an anonymous email: John Avlon, Wingnuts: Extremism in the Age of Obama (New York, 2014), 204–207.
“I think there are questions”: Gabriel Winant, “The Birthers in Congress,” Salon, July 28, 2009, www
“the public rightly,” etc.: Quoted in Jed Lewison, “Palin Goes Birther,” Daily Kos, December 3, 2009, www
58 percent of Republicans: Poll by Research 2000, reported in “Birthers Are Mostly Republican and Southern,” Daily Kos, July 31, 2009, www
“Why doesn’t he,” etc.: The View, ABC, March 23, 2011.
“There’s at least,” etc.: “Donald Trump Responds,” NYT, April 8, 2011.
threatened to write a book: The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, CNN, January 6, 2016.
“an enveloping fire”: Choe Sang-hun, “North Korea Says It Might Fire Missiles into Waters Near Guam,” NYT, August 9, 2017.
“Guam is American,” etc.: Eddie Baza Calvo, August 9, 2017, youtu.be/YgdXG-LPUBw.
60 percent of the island’s: Michael Kranz, “Here’s How Puerto Rico Got into So Much Debt,” Business Insider, October 9, 2017.
more likely to die … fewer federal personnel: A. J. Willingham, “A Look at Four Storms from One Brutal Hurricane Season,” CNN, November 21, 2017. A full comparison of Maria and Harvey is Danny Vinik, “How Trump Favored Texas over Puerto Rico,” March 27, 2018, Politico, www
less media: Anushka Shah, Allan Ko, and Fernando Peinado, “The Mainstream Media Didn’t Care About Puerto Rico Until It Became a Trump Story,” Washington Post, November 27, 2017.
charitable giving: Marco delia Cava, “Why Puerto Rico Donations Lag Behind Fundraising for Harvey, Irma Victims,” USA Today, October 5, 2017.
“Recognize that we”: “In Battered Puerto Rico, Governor Warns of a ‘Humanitarian Crisis,’” NYT, September 25, 2017.
a slight majority of mainlanders: Morning Consult, National Tracking Poll 170916, September 2017, morningconsult.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/170916_crosstabs_pr_v1_KD.pdf.
thirty overseas bases: David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York, 2015), 5.
U.S. bases: Department of Defense, Base Structure Report, Fiscal Year 2015 Baseline, 6; Vine, Base Nation, 4.