Truer U.S. History: Race, Borders, and Status Manipulation.

• Author: Erman, Sam

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

BY DANIEL IMMERWAHR

FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, 2019

BOOK REVIEW CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1190 I. EMPIRE STORMS MAINSTREAM U.S. HISTORY. 1192 II. WHAT'S MISSING? 1200 A. Multitudes, Uncounted Still 1201 B. Law's Palpable Absence 1208 III. TOWARD YET-TRUER U.S. HISTORY 1212 A. The Founding to the Second Founding 1213 1. All Statuses Lead to Native Dispossession. 1213 2. Manipulating Status in the Service of Slavery 1216 B. The Second Founding to World War II 1221 l. The Decline of the Reconstruction Constitution as a Restraint on Empire 1222 2. New Statuses to Make the Constitution Safe for Empire 1225 3. Doctrinal Cross-Pollination of Subordination 1233 C. Postwar America 1237 1. Status Severing: Empire and Indians 1237 2. Status Forgetting: Immigration and Racial Caste 1244 CONCLUSION 1247 INTRODUCTION

Daniel Immerwahr's How to Hide an Empire (1) reached bookshelves during the 400th anniversary of the arrival of African slaves in Virginia. (2) It is a fitting coincidence for a book devoted to teaching Americans that their country has always been fundamentally imperial. Virginia of 1619 was a colony in the English empire. Its geographic bounds were measured in lands lost by the Algonquian. (3) Lifetimes would pass before the American Revolution, the United States, and the U.S. Constitution arose. Yet, here in utero, were the original sins of the United States: colonial modes of governance, racialized chattel slavery, and continental American Indian dispossession. It was empire that laid the foundation on which the United States would be built, notwithstanding the intervening revolt against British imperial rule. The ensuing near-quarter millennium has seen the United States emerge as both the world's longest-continuing national experiment in democracy and the planet's most powerful empire.

Immerwahr's aim is nothing short of placing the U.S. empire at the center of mainstream U.S. history. The project is ambitious, worthwhile, and successful. Making U.S. sovereignty and similar forms of U.S. control his touchstone, he "aims to show what U.S. history would look like if the 'United States' meant the 'Greater United States,'" not just the states and Washington, D.C. (4) By constitutional definition, these are places whose inhabitants are subject to a federal authority in which they have no formal governance role. (5) Racism underlies the second-class status. Immerwahr tells the story masterfully, mixing humor and poignancy with a sense of wonder into a gripping account.

And yet,... 1619.

While this is not a book that makes many mistakes, it is a book that does not do everything. Slavery is largely absent from Immerwahr's account, notwithstanding his ambition to produce a U.S. history that gives empire, racism, and borders their due. The lacuna is partly a result of his focus on lands outside of states. This focus leads to similarly limited attention to interrelated dynamics involving stateside racism, immigration, and the experiences of Indigenous people who no longer hold territory. Also missing is sustained attention to the legal dynamics that thoroughly structure much of what Immewahr describes. Unlike legal historians before and since, (6) Immerwahr lays emphasis elsewhere. He pays legal matters little mind.

It is a mark of the book's richness that Immerwahr welcomes critics to "identify various omissions" that "can be collectively taken as a game plan for how the field might move forward." (7) His is a truer account with lofty and perhaps inevitably unfulfilled ambitions that create opportunities for yet-truer successors.

In that spirit, this Book Review sketches out a revised Immerwahrian account, one that engages head on with the broader legal history of race and borders in the United States. Doing so requires starting with the original American sins: dispossession of American Indians and racial chattel slavery. Both haunt the national character still. Formal empire and immigration have also brought aliens within U.S. borders, and they too have been sites of racist exclusion. (8) In every case, law helped accomplish and hide the wrongs done. This is fitting, given that the American ideals of democracy, liberty, equality, and rule of law have also been key causes of willful national blindness to bad U.S. acts.

A crucial mechanism in the shameful and self-obscuring U.S. history of race and borders has been what I term "status manipulation." The term is in deliberate tension with itself. Status is a legal classification that relates people or places to polities while assigning them a condition or position. It indicates belonging (or its absence), carries official consequences, and generally presents as fixed and enduring. By contrast, manipulation involves purposeful change: the craftsperson's triumph in transforming raw materials into beautiful and useful objects or the con artist's malevolent genius at making the improbable appear certain. (9) While U.S. legal history is full of legal innovators who sought a better world, this Review's focus is on oppressors who distorted law for objectionable ends. Hence, as used here, status manipulation combines apparent continuity and actual change to achieve subordination from the shadows. Status poses as immemorial and permanent despite always being constructed and reconstructed--an apt metaphor for a nation that endlessly violates its ideals without rejecting them.

1. EMPIRE STORMS MAINSTREAM U.S. HISTORY.

   Three arguments animate How to Hide an Empire: (1) The United States has always been an empire; (2) it has almost always obscured that reality; and (3) for the better part of a century, technology and standardization have allowed the United States to remain imperial while shedding distant lands. Immerwahr dramatically frames his first claim: "From the day the treaty securing independence from Britain was ratified, right up to the present, [the United States has] been a collection of states and territories. It's been a partitioned country, divided into two sections, with different laws applying in each." (10) Yet, this house divided has stood for centuries and received repeated additions. The U.S. imperial project has been stunningly successful at accruing global power. What began as a country pasted to North America's eastern seaboard, barely able to establish and maintain independence, transformed into the world's sole superpower.

   The realization of America's will to power came in stages: (i) the transcontinental empire, (ii) the noncontiguous empire, and (iii) the pointillist empire. The transcontinental empire stretched from the Founding through the closing of the frontier. During these years, white land hunger drove relentless expansion of U.S. borders and control across the continent. No matter that American Indians already occupied the lands; dispossession, betrayal, and extermination were tools ready to hand. The result was settler colonialism, as white settlers from the east slowly occupied and displaced (or killed) Indigenous inhabitants. As the nineteenth century wound down, U.S. control was firmly established from coast to coast.

   Expansion of U.S. control over noncontiguous territories slowly began in the mid-nineteenth century, with the United States asserting exclusive rights to the resources of small, uninhabited oceanic specks known as Guano Islands. Then came the 1867 acquisition of Alaska, geographically enormous but sparsely populated. The fever pitch arrived as a result of the U.S. victory over Spain in the War of 1898, which occasioned the annexation of Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. These new acquisitions differed from prior ones. They were racially heterogeneous and densely populated, hence poor candidates for settler colonialism by mainland whites seeking numerical dominance. (11) As a result, they were generally not envisioned as future states. (12) Their value came from their strategically located ports and extractive resources, such as fertilizer and sugar. (13) Rather than replace or integrate inhabitants of the newly acquired territories, the United States held and ruled them.

   Then--suddenly--the expansion of U.S. governance over new territories exploded and collapsed. First, victory in World War II transformed the United States into an occupying power for millions upon millions of people around the globe. (14) Indeed, the postwar United States briefly governed more people by occupation and colonialism than it had mainland U.S. citizens. (15) Almost as quickly, the United States abandoned its relationships of occupation and colonial rule, making exceptions only for certain dispersed specks of territory. Some of these specks were formally within U.S. sovereignty: Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, the Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. (16) Others remained subject to extensive U.S. control: Guantanamo Bay, overseas U.S. military bases, and, until recently, the Panama Canal Zone. (17) Through new technologies, the United States projected imperial power across a global grid anchored by mere pinpricks of land. (18) The pointillist empire had arrived.

   It is a convincing story, this portrait of the ever-imperial United States. But Immerwahr aims for more. He wants you to ask, "How did I miss that?" Hence his title, which puts Empire behind How to Hide it. And his dedication to the "uncounted," rather than the disempowered. (19) He is quick to reassure his reader that it's not you who is to blame, it's the U.S. empire and its willful blindspot as to its true nature:

   One of the truly distinctive features of the United States' empire is how persistently ignored it has been.... The British weren't confused as to whether there was a British Empire.... France didn't forget that Algeria was French. It is only the United States that has suffered from chronic confusion about its own borders. (20) Early in the twentieth century, the British had...