* How to Hide an Empire_ A History of the Gr - Daniel Immerwahr
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** This trilemma makes a good model on which to build a new expansionist policy for America, after the white superimacy issue has been solved by demography.
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This was, not surprisingly, a controversial matter. During the war, during the congressional debates over the treaty with Spain, and during the heated election of 1900, the question of empire was argued at high volume.

In essence, it was an argument about a trilemma. Republicanism, white supremacy, and overseas expansion—the country could have at most two. In the past, republicanism and white supremacy had been jointly maintained by carefully shaping the country’s borders. But absorbing populous nonwhite colonies would wreck all that.

The opponents of empire gathered behind William Jennings Bryan, who had run against McKinley in 1896 and did so again in 1900. Bryan delighted in exposing the contradictions between republicanism and empire. The inalienable rights of man and the injustice of taxation without representation—these were bedrock political values. But imagine, Bryan warned, what would happen if the United States took colonies. Anyone setting forth to speak about republican virtues—say, at a Fourth of July celebration—would be urged to keep silent “lest his utterances excite rebellion among distant subjects.”

It was a compelling argument, and Bryan commanded a large and motley coalition of anti-imperialists. It included such African Americans as W.E.B. Du Bois and hard-line white supremacists such as Senator “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina. Businessmen (Andrew Carnegie, who offered to buy the Philippines for $20 million so he could set it free) and labor leaders (Samuel Gompers, president of the AFL) joined the cause. So did the presidents of Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Michigan, and Northwestern.

But empire, once seized, was hard to drop. Roosevelt wanted it, and behind him stood the bulk of the Republican political establishment. For many, it was a matter of more than just the economic benefits that Alfred Thayer Mahan had promised. As they saw it, overseas colonization was the next phase of Manifest Destiny, the next outlet for the Daniel Boones of the country. “God has given us this Pacific empire for civilization,” said Senator Albert Beveridge. “A hundred wildernesses are to be subdued. Unpenetrated regions must be explored. Unviolated valleys must be tilled. Unmastered forests must be felled.”

The imperialists offered a different solution to the trilemma. They were willing to sacrifice republicanism, at least as applied to so-called backward races. Roosevelt scorned those “who cant about ‘liberty’ and the ‘consent of the governed,’ in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men.” He continued: “Their doctrines, if carried out, would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to decline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever having settled in these United States.”

There was, of course, a third option: jettison white supremacy. The overseas territories could be treated as embryonic states and their inhabitants as full citizens. This solution commanded a great deal of enthusiasm within the territories themselves, where political parties in Puerto Rico and the Philippines inserted demands for statehood into their platforms. With the western continental territories in mind, they imagined their countries, in time, entering the union as equals.

 Yet mainland support for this was scant. When the prospect of statehood came up, it did so mainly as a scare tactic—a way for anti-imperialists to underscore the horrors resulting from annexing these places.

At any rate, colonized subjects had little chance to press their case. What is remarkable, in fact, about the mainland debates over empire is how utterly absent Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, and other inhabitants of the territories were from them. Most mainlanders had never even seen a Filipino, a Puerto Rican, or a Hawaiian.

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** Fascinating. The white supremacist side of the argument clearly laid out, and with a hypothetical case of US colonizing Egypt too!
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The Filipinos made it to Omaha (though the secretary of war had to personally promise that they would return home after the fair). There, they made an impression. “They are stylish dressers,” wrote the Omaha Bee, resembling less a “race of savages” than “a lot of dudes” with their canes, derby hats, and white trousers. Fairgoers expecting the Filipino band to offer exotic folk music were surprised when it struck up a lively rendition of “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” the theme song for Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Culturally, the fair’s Filipinos seemed to embrace their new nationality.

Legally, however, things remained unresolved. The Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Did that include the territories?

The 1898–1900 annexations had already raised the question of what the United States was, in language and on maps. Now it was coming up in law. And it made its way to the Supreme Court, via a series of connected cases, in 1901.

Weighty legal questions often turn around trivial disputes. Certainly the cases that carried this question up to the Supreme Court seemed piddling: whether an importer shipping oranges from Puerto Rico to New York had to pay a tariff, or whether a soldier returning from the Philippines owed taxes on the diamond rings he’d acquired there. But under them lay a deeper question. The Constitution prohibits taxing commerce between parts of the United States. Did that rule cover the overseas territories, too? In other words, were they part of the country?

The government, which had collected the tariffs, sought to defend its actions. It argued that the term the United States was ambiguous. The name could refer to all the area under U.S. jurisdiction, but it could also refer, in a narrower sense, to the union of states. The Constitution’s references to “the United States,” the argument continued, were meant in that narrow sense, to refer to the states alone. Territories thus had no right to constitutional protections, for the simple reason that the Constitution didn’t apply to them. As one justice summarized the logic, the Constitution was “the supreme law of the land,” but the territories were “not part of the ‘land.’”

This might have come as a surprise to residents of the western territories, who had assumed that they had the same constitutional protections as their compatriots in the states. But, the attorney general maintained, that was a polite fiction with little basis in law. Mincing few words, he reminded the justices that Congress could impose laws on the territories “without asking the consent of the inhabitants, even against their consent and against their protest, as it has frequently done.” He brought up Congress’s dismantling of Indian Country, and he noted that Alaskans had “no right to elect a single officer, or to form a city, or to establish a political system or anything whatever for their own protection.” The overseas territories—which he referred to openly as “colonies”—were no different. The Filipinos in San Francisco Bay had it wrong; they were subjects, not citizens.

 This was precisely the sort of talk that raised anti-imperialists’ hackles, but the attorney general plowed on. “To be called an American subject is no disgrace,” he consoled. Moreover, he continued, the government needed the ability to rule its possessions as colonies. This was the age of empire. What if the United States were to annex Egypt, Sudan, part of Central Africa, or “a section of the Chinese Empire”? Would it be forced to apply the Constitution to those places, too? “A great world power, extending its domain from the frozen seas on the North to where the encircling palm trees grow in the Pacific islands, must not be bound by rules too strict or too confining.”

The argument prevailed. The court affirmed that “the Constitution deals with states” and that territorial rights were at Congress’s discretion. Congress could, if it wished, “incorporate” territories into the union and bring them under the protection of the Constitution, as the court judged that it had in the case of the western territories. Some years later, the court also concluded that Alaska and Hawai‘i, the territories beyond the mainland that seemed the most conducive to white settlement, had also been “incorporated.” But the point was that incorporation was not automatic, and the court repeatedly denied that Congress had ever incorporated the former Spanish colonies.

Invoking the notion that there were different “senses” of “the United States,” a concurring justice articulated the reasoning in a notoriously convoluted phrase. Puerto Rico was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” he explained, “because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”

Lawyers with long memories would have recognized in that unusual word, appurtenant, a reference to the Navassa Island case of more than a decade before. There, the defense had argued that although the guano islands were “appertaining to the United States,” they weren’t part of it, and thus weren’t subject to U.S. law. The Supreme Court had disagreed. But whereas the Navassa case had affirmed the government’s power to apply federal laws in its territories, the new rulings denied territorial inhabitants the right to federal protections.

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** Sa'ad Zaghloul sucking up to racist Woodrow Wilson
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Getting to Paris, and getting to Wilson, became the chief goal of nationalists everywhere. The Indian National Congress voted to send Gandhi to present its demands. Egyptian nationalists sought to send Sa‘d Zaghlul, a leading reformer. Zaghlul began taking English lessons in the hope of meeting Wilson. “No people more than the Egyptian people,” he wrote to Wilson, “has felt strongly the joyous emotion of the birth of a new era which, thanks to your virile action, is soon going to impose itself upon the universe.” Zaghlul’s supporters organized a new political party around the goal of getting him to Paris. They called it the Wafd, which means “delegation” in Arabic.
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** Even in 1942, Egypt's problem was infrastructure
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It made a certain sense that the United States would fight the war by managing the back end of things, for it had the world’s largest industrial economy and its factories were far from the fighting. By 1940, nearly every independent nation outside Axis orbits had sought to acquire munitions from the United States.

The Roosevelt administration was only too happy to oblige, via an evolving set of schemes designed to circumvent neutrality laws and conserve the Allies’ dwindling dollar reserves. First, there were direct purchases. Then “cash and carry,” “destroyers for bases,” and finally “lend-lease.” Well before the United States declared war, it was sending planes, engines, tanks, and other war goods to the fronts.

That stream of stuff mattered. By early 1941, Britain’s Asian empire hung by a thread. Axis forces had largely captured the Mediterranean, and Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had knocked the British back on their heels in Egypt. If Britain lost the Middle East, it would lose everything: Iraq’s oil fields, stockpiles of war matériel in Egypt, and the Suez Canal, which connected the British Isles to India, Australia, New Zealand, Malaya, Burma, and Singapore. British officials warned Washington of the complete “disintegration of the British commonwealth.”

It was easy enough for the United States to supply tanks and planes. The hard part was getting them to the front lines—Detroit to Cairo was a long haul. The tanks could be disassembled and shipped by sea around the southern tip of Africa, but that meant unloading them at Cairo’s primitive ports, which had no warehouses, no assembly plants, few railways, light roads, and a dire shortage of mechanics.

 “The condition of Egyptian ports” isn’t a subject that would have interested many in Washington in 1935. But now it did. The United States launched a massive Middle Eastern infrastructure campaign. Up went new piers with cranes to unload tanks, assembly plants to put them together, railways and hard roads to carry them to the front, and repair shops to keep them running. By June 1942, the depot near Cairo had a large airport, housing for nearly ten thousand men, a thousand-bed hospital, warehouses, and enough spare parts, tools, and skilled mechanics to keep the whole operation functioning.

That’s what it took to get tanks to the Middle East. To bring planes and smaller goods, the United States blazed a different trail: an aerial highway of bases dipping down from Miami to Brazil, cutting over to West Africa, and hopping across the Sahara to Cairo. This, too, required serious infrastructural investment. Swamps had to be drained, jungles cleared, rock blasted, and sandstorms fought.

And they were. Buoyed by much-needed U.S. supplies, the British Eighth Army struck back at the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942, pouring fire into Rommel’s position. “I have seen many enemy barrages,” recorded one terrified driver behind German lines, “but the intensity of this one is beyond our experience.” Just as the British pushed Rommel out of Egypt into Tunisia, three mighty fleets collectively containing seven hundred ships landed on African shores with the necessaries to expel the Axis from Africa entirely within six months.

Britain’s lifeline to its empire was saved. “It marked in fact the turning of the ‘Hinge of Fate,’” Churchill wrote. “It may almost be said, ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein, we never had a defeat.’”

The campaign also transformed the Middle East, converting it into what the secretary of state called a “tremendous supply base” for the Allies. Factories in Palestine made batteries, those in Iran made antifreeze, and canning plants in Egypt produced rations for the troops. The northern half of Africa, which had been a virtual terra incognita for the United States, hummed with U.S. bases, ports, assembly plants, barracks, and warehouses.

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** As the author explaines below, there is a gradual weaning off resource economies. Following WWI, Haber-Bosch weaned the world of nitrates. Following WWII it was synthetics. Now it seems to be oil, first through the shale revolution in the US and later through fusion energy. Once energy abundance becocmes a reality, most mining will be sea water (not seabed) mining. Landlocked economies will stay poorer and less integrated. Eventually, the ultimate mines, factories and cities will be in space. Another extrapolation of this is increased resilience and autonomy on locality and household levels.
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The empire-killing technologies ranged from skywave radio to screw threads, and they worked in different ways. But, collectively, they weaned the United States off colonies. In so doing, they also helped to create the world we know today, where powerful countries project their influence through globalization rather than colonization.

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** TODO Fantastic stuff. I need to look for sources on this.
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It is fitting, then, that oil is the one raw material that has most reliably tempted politicians back into the old logic of empire. When faced with an Arab oil embargo, Henry Kissinger suggested that the United States may have to take some oil fields. Im not saying we have to take over Saudi Arabia, the secretary of state continued. How about Abu Dhabi, or Libya? It is hard to imagine Kissinger embarking on such unbounded flights of imperialist reverie on behalf of rubber, tin, or any other former colonial commodity.
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