Pacific Island Times Vol 3 No. 7 July 2019 | Page 6

Daniel Immerwahr
Redrawing the US map
By Bruce Lloyd
T
eaching American history in venues as varied
as the University of California-Berkeley and
San Quentin Prison, now Northwestern Uni-
versity professor Daniel Immerwahr began to sense
that traditional American history and the normal
maps of the nation failed, or one might say, served
to conceal its true dimensions.
Immerwahr is the author “How to Hide an
Empire: A Greater History of the United States.”
Released in February, Immerwahr’s book is a
pathbreaking history of the United States’ overseas
possessions and the true meaning of its empire.
Generations of students were taught using class-
room maps that presented the U.S. as the original
lower 48 states. Until they became states, the terri-
tories of Alaska and Hawaii were often not featured
on these maps. And far-flung pieces of American
soil such as Guam and American Samoa weren’t to
be seen at all. Even not-so-far-flung territories such
as Puerto Rico weren’t there either. More remark-
ably, the biggest territory or colony if you like, the
Philippines, which gained independence in 1946,
wasn’t generally presented as part of the American
union.
Immerwahr said he didn’t set out to provide a
moral critique of America, but rather to reframe its
history by fixing its map, but he has touched off
plenty of criticism from the right and correspond-
ing enthusiasm from the left, not a particularly
unusual happening in the America of 2019. In the
course of eight years of research, he found plenty
to criticize about America’s second-class treatment
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of its insular possessions.
“There’s been a longstanding argument about
whether the United States is or isn’t an empire and
usually that argument is about its character, about
whether it’s a force for liberty or a rapacious
world dominator. And I took myself to be doing
something different. I didn’t set out to vilify or
venerate the United States, not to talk about
its character but its shape, literally,” he said.
America’s notoriously short attention span
and the remoteness of many of these areas
from the mainland resulted in an out-of-sight-
out of mind situation. Their resident U.S. cit-
izens or nationals to this day have no voting
rights in national elections and very limited
representation in the U.S. Congress. They
must often make pilgrimages to Washington
to plead for attention to issues that affect
them. Usually it’s a war or threat of war that puts
the insular areas on the radar screen.
World War II made many Americans aware of
the Pacific, as many engaged in island-hopping
battles against the Japanese. The GIs fought hard in
the re-taking of Guam from Japanese occupation,
but while this is annually celebrated on the island
with Liberation Day events, the reality is a little
different. Local people later came to realize that
Washington had declined to spend more money to
build up Guam’s defenses and that the American
military, though aware of an imminent Japanese
invasion, had been systematically pulling out its
personnel before the Japanese arrived with bomb-
ers and ground forces.
Immerwahr said the Americans also showed little
concern for the estimated 1.1 million Filipinos who
died during the war, by far the worst blood bath in
American history.
“What’s so painful about it is the complicity of
Washington in those war deaths, because a lot of
What does this say to other U.S.
insular areas, some of which lack
important military bases or major
resources? Immerwahr watched a
2017 video of former Guam Gov. Eddie
Calvo on the phone with the president
during the “fire and fury” standoff
with North Korea, leaving him to
wonder what that was all about.
those folks who died, died both as the result of U.S.
grand strategy and also died in some cases from
friendly fire. And the fact that this was just blithely
passed over on the mainland, doesn’t even count as
part of U.S. history, that struck me as completely
unacceptable.”
Immerwahr said it was a familiar pattern, now
being played out in Puerto Rico, a flag territory to
which President Trump seems to be hostile, or con-
temptuous as reflected by tossing paper towels to a
gathering of hard pressed Puerto Ricans during his
post-Hurricane Maria visit. The legal challenges to
Trump’s travel ban, one of them from a sitting fed-
eral judge reflected some of the prevailing attitude.
“[Former Attorney General Jeff] Sessions said he
was amazed that a judge sitting on a Pacific island
could interfere with the president, revealing that
he still didn’t regard Hawaii as part of the United
States. I sort of get the sense that the Trump admin-
istration would be thrilled to de-annex Puerto Rico,
though I can’t imagine that happening any time
soon. The Trump administration is feeling that this
territory is filled with foreigners, so why should the
United States have any connection with this island,
just let the thing go. In this way, Trump is kind
of recapitulating an older racist imperialism that
desired to restrict the United States to the mainland
so it wouldn’t have to deal with people who don’t
seem to fit.”
What does this say to other U.S. insular areas,
some of which lack important military bases or
major resources? Immerwahr watched a 2017 video
of former Guam Gov. Eddie Calvo on the phone
with the president during the “fire and fury” stand-
off with North Korea, leaving him to wonder what
that was all about. “I can easily imagine that Trump
knew Guam only as a base site and not as part of
the United States. That seems completely plausible
to me,” he said.
And as to the other parts of what Immerwahr
styles the American empire in plain sight, “I don’t
think there’s a lot of reason if you’re living in one
of these areas to be particularly optimistic about
this administration’s support,” he said. “I do think
we’re at a moment when overseas territories are
getting a lot more visibility and I think there’s a
lot of reason to believe that we could see a future
Congress that would be more interested in talking
about status changes, increased representation and
that’s not unthinkable.”