How to Hide an Empire is the bookend, if you will to James Bradley's The Imperial Cruise. From its title alone, Daniel Immerwahr's thesis is clear: yes, the United States is and has long been an empire. (This surprises exactly no one who has read such works as Lost Kingdom or Notes on a Foreign Country.) More than the outlines of the empire itself, which Immerwahr traces diligently and convincingly, what he truly sets out to explore is how so few Americans can possibly be aware of the facts of empire. Aside from the obvious answer that what passes for 'education' in this country frequently leaves much to be desired, Immerwahr points to the fact that globalization has replaced colonization, making it easier to hide an empire. And then, of course, is the deeply ingrained American belief that empire is 'bad' and that empires are, at their core, at least a little bit evil. Drawing on the example of Star Wars, Immerwahr writes that the US "even fights empires in its dreams."
Perhaps, though, it's surprising that the US empire was never larger than it was. After all, this is a country where, in 1830, fewer than 100 people called Chicago home; six decades later, more than a million residents lived in the shadows of the world's first "dense cluster of skyscrapers" - and this despite the best efforts of Mrs. O'Leary's cow. The sky was the limit, no? (And perhaps it might have been had the Americans not been late to the party. This lateness is at least partially attributable to the war for independence they had to fight from their own mother empire, Great Britain, but I digress. In any event, Cecil Rhodes was already lamenting that "the world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonized" well before Teddy and the Rough Riders charged San Juan Hill.)
Speaking of Teddy, Immerwahr walks a fine line between awe at Teddy's exploits and exasperation at their extent, as when he notes "that the man who played such an important part in starting and expanding the war - a political appointee with no combat experience - should also become the hero of its decisive battle seems more fictional than factual. But an aura of "Wait, that really happened?" engulfed much of Theodore Roosevelt's life." It's also from Immerwahr that I learned for the first time that while campaigning for president, Roosevelt was shot in the chest and close range and preceded to speak for an hour as "blood ran from his body" before, presumably, seeking medical attention. How did we not cover *that* in school?
Joking aside, this is a book everyone in America needs to read, for the lessons here are unfortunately entirely too timely and resonant today. One example? "Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and this is what you got: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that fed on land but avoided incorporating people. Uninhabited guano islands - those were fine. But all of Mexico or Nicaragua? No." What's striking about the empire of old, though perhaps it shouldn't be, given the aforementioned, is how poorly the US ran it once it was established. As Immerwahr notes, there was a period of months - months! - when the entire territory of Alaska had not a single federal official in it. FDR's first governor of Puerto Rico "left reporters with the distinct impression that he didn't know where the island was." Mercy.
Still, as timely as this work is, it's Immerwahr's writing that makes it such a pleasure to read. Writing of the nuclear tests on Bikini atoll, Immerwahr notes, "to the proverbial Martian looking on from space, it must have appeared that humanity was for some indiscernible reason waging furious, unrelenting war on a string of sandbars in the middle of the Pacific." Or consider his description of the valor displayed by the Hawaiian regiments in World War II: " 'valor' in this case being a euphemism for an extreme disregard for personal safety in the enthusiastic service of killing Nazis," or of war itself, which Immerwahr writes is "entropy." He explains, "atoms split, buildings tumble, people die, and things fall apart. As wars go, the Second World War was the big one - a giant, planetwide entropic pulse that converted whole cities to rubble and some fifty-five million living humans into corpses." (At the risk of stating the obviously, I'll note how much more powerful - and persuasive - Immerwahr's description is as compared to the anodyne "war is hell.")
It is largely to this planetwide entropic pulse that Immerwahr attributes the fall of the old empires. Beyond the well-known impulses toward independence, Immerwahr makes the case that the efforts necessitated to win the war - the need to develop synthetics for rubber and silk and so much more that became unavailable when the colonies went offline amidst the fighting - meant that once the war was over, the empires as they had existed for centuries - as the source of raw materials - were no longer needed. The materials the colonies had long supplied could now be created with the magic of chemistry. At least in the developed world. U Thant's observation that "the truth, the central stupendous truth, about developed economies is that they can have - in anything but the shortest run - the kind and scale of resources they decide to have," rings as true today as the world clamors for supplies of a covid vaccine, as it did in the 1960s.
And so it is that science and the global economy have given the US an empire the likes of which even good Queen Vic never could have imagined. Late in the book, Immerwahr offers an example (something to do with changing the universal standard for stop signs, shortly after having set the standard) of the "stupefying privilege of the United States." He's not wrong - it's just that said privilege extends so far beyond stop signs as to beggar belief. That most of the inhabitants of this country are unaware of the fact is proof in itself.
Five stars.
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