Puerto Rico in the U.S. Empire: A Reply to Anne Macpherson

Anne Macpherson has written a thoughtful reflection on my book, and I’m grateful for the chance to reply. Macpherson is a Caribbeanist and from that perspective has four major objections. First, she argues, I don’t fully explain how the U.S. territories were hidden from mainland view. Second, I downplay the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories. Third, I fail to appreciate the Greater Caribbean as the setting for Puerto Rican history. Fourth, I leave out other important aspects of Puerto Rico’s past. I’ll reply briefly to these objections, handling a few smaller matters in footnotes.

The title of my book is How to Hide an Empire and throughout I give examples of mainlanders ignorant of the fact that the United States has a territorial empire. The problem continues today. Yet Macpherson doesn’t think I explain this ignorance satisfactorily. For her, what is “hidden” by my book is that “the federal government does not want Americans to notice the non-incorporated territories or what their existence means about the character of the United States.”

I agree with Macpherson that the federal government has played a role, and I don’t believe I hide that fact. Indeed, I show how the census, presidents, and Supreme Court have helped relegate the overseas territories to the margins.[1] But I think we need a broader explanation. Alongside and informing the governmental marginalization of the colonies, there has been a strong current of popular racism leading mainlanders to dismiss the overseas territories as foreign and irrelevant. In my book, I discuss how Broadway musicals, non-governmental maps, and mainland journalism have consistently written the colonies out of the story, too. The combined effect has been to make the United States seem like a nation-state rather than an empire, a contiguous country with no territories.

Macpherson bristles at my talk of “territories.” She notes that Puerto Rico, the focus of her research, is not just a territory but a particular type of territory: an unincorporated territory. In the early twentieth century, the Insular Cases divided the United States’ annexed lands into two categories. Of the overseas territories, the Supreme Court ruled that the ones with larger white settler populations, Hawai‘i and Alaska, were incorporated, while it ruled that the others were unincorporated. Macpherson fears I don’t stress the distinction enough. She writes that my book spends only a “miniscule” amount of time on the topic (4–5 pages, actually) and that I often speak generally of “territories” without distinguishing the legal flavors.[2] “Non-incorporation is simply not an organizing principle” of How to Hide an Empire, Macpherson writes.

She’s correct, it’s not. But should it be? I’ve been influenced by the work of legal historian Christina Duffy Ponsa-Kraus, a specialist on Puerto Rico and a central scholar on this topic. Ponsa-Kraus argues that “the significance of the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories has been substantially exaggerated” and points out that the incorporated territories were also legally subordinated to the states.[3] In my own research, I saw incorporated territories treated as colonies just as unincorporated ones were. Hence, for example, the imposition of brutal martial law on the Territory of Hawai‘i from 1941 to 1944, justified by the federal government because Hawai‘i was a territory and not a state.[4] Hawai‘i was incorporated, but that did little to protect it.[5] I’m extremely uncomfortable with Macpherson’s persistent identification of colonialism with non-incorporation, as if Hawai‘i, Alaska, and Indian Territory weren’t also colonized.

There are two other good reasons to consider non-state spaces under U.S. jurisdiction together, rather than starkly dividing incorporated from unincorporated territories. First, doing so allows us to connect settler colonialism and overseas empire by making room for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century territories—these were neither incorporated nor unincorporated because the legal distinction didn’t yet exist.[6] Second, it makes it easier to recognize continuities between inhabited overseas territories and other overseas administered spaces, such as uninhabited islands, military bases, and occupation zones, which I believe should also be part of the story, even if they don’t fit into the incorporated/unincorporated schema.[7]

Macpherson’s next objection concerns geography. She stresses the importance of the Greater Caribbean—“a blurry-edged ecological, economic, social, and cultural region”—for Puerto Rican history. She gives examples of scholarship that profitably places Puerto Rican history within that context. But How to Hide an Empire is “conceptually at odds with Greater Caribbean historiography,” she writes, because it groups Puerto Rico with Hawai‘i and Guam rather than with Jamaica and Colombia.

It does, but I don’t agree that there is a conceptual clash here. The Greater Caribbean is one useful frame; the Greater United States is, I hope, another. None of the scholars contributing to the Greater Caribbean literature have to my knowledge insisted that their geographic focus is the only way to contextualize Puerto Rican history, and I certainly don’t make any such claim on behalf of the Greater United States. In fact, some of the books she cites as central to our understanding of the Greater Caribbean—by José Amador, Michael Donoghue, and Jorge Duany—were also crucial in informing my narrative.[8]

Historians encounter different geographical frames all the time. We can understand Texas as part of the U.S./Mexico borderlands, part of a global oil empire, and part of the former Confederacy. None of these geographies contradicts the others, and all are relevant to making sense of Texas. Similarly, in suggesting that we can productively understand Puerto Rico as part of the U.S. territorial empire, I am not hiding, rejecting, denying, or diminishing Greater Caribbean historiography. I’m just doing something different.

But Macpherson thinks there are other important aspects of Puerto Rican historiography that I “hide,” beyond the Caribbean turn. My book “ignores” Puerto Rican history before 1898, offers only glimpses of it past the 1950s, and tells the reader too little about Puerto Rican women and gender, party politics, racial identities, capitalism, labor conditions and organizing, and the diaspora. Again, Macpherson cites a rich literature.

And again, I fail to see the problem. How to Hide an Empire tries to engage readers in the history of the U.S. territorial empire through what Macpherson rightly calls an “episodic narrative.” Puerto Rico receives more attention than most places, accounting for three of the book’s twenty-two short chapters. But this is not a book that makes the slightest gesture toward offering comprehensive coverage of any territory or overseas space. Similar gaps could easily be found in my treatment of Hawai‘i, the Panama Canal Zone, Guantánamo Bay, Dhahran, or the Northern Marianas.

The stronger claim would be to point out not what How to Hide an Empire omits but what it thereby gets wrong. Here Macpherson is less forthcoming. The themes I do treat, she allows, are “important.” The main interpretive sin of which she accuses me is this: by saying little about Puerto Rico after the 1950s, I make it seem as if Puerto Rico was no longer a colony. Perhaps this was a cost of my moving onto other topics, yet nowhere do I claim that Puerto Rico’s colonial status ended. Just the opposite, in fact. In 1952, I tell how the territory got a new constitution and became a commonwealth.[9] But, as I write, “the actual lines of authority didn’t change” and I note that the lawyer who drafted the constitution “maintained that Puerto Rico was still a colony.”[10] Whether it is remains a subject of heated political debate today. Macpherson counts Puerto Rico as a colony still, though, and so do I. In my book’s conclusion (“Enduring Empire”), I argue that “empire lives on” in Puerto Rico and the United States’ four other inhabited territories.[11]

Macpherson feels that I don’t say enough about the parts of Puerto Rican history she finds essential. But could any broad narrative about the U.S. territorial empire satisfy Macpherson’s demands for comprehensiveness vis-à-vis Puerto Rico? I am not sure. The sole example Macpherson gives of an acceptable book that covers the U.S. empire beyond Puerto Rico is Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano’s Colonial Crucible, a 685-page, co-edited anthology to which 48 authors contributed. I share Macpherson’s admiration for Colonial Crucible, yet even that terrific work has tremendous gaps and makes no attempt to cover many of the areas of Puerto Rico under U.S. rule that Macpherson faults me for saying too little about: gender, post-1952 cultural nationalism, labor organizing, migration/diaspora. Still, Macpherson concludes that Colonial Crucible achieves something that “no single-authored volume can do with regard to the non-incorporated territories” because “their historiographies are simply too large for any one person to master and synthesize.”

If Macpherson is correct that no one could ever command the expertise to write a history of the U.S. territorial empire, then that’s bad news for our field. But I’m more optimistic. I’ve read Julian Go’s Patterns of Empire, which synthesizes not only research on U.S. colonies but research on the British Empire, too, into a sharp, thoughtful account.[12] I’ve read Lanny Thompson’s Imperial Archipelago, which carefully considers the continuities and differences in imperial governance in the United States’ various colonies.[13] And I’ve read recent articles by Alvita Akiboh and Funie Hsu, which respectively tell the tales of U.S. money and English-language instruction within the empire.[14] Such works don’t profess to capture every historical detail or historiographical tendency. But they are informed, authoritative, and illuminating.

Macpherson concludes with the hope that we will be able to “steer students of U.S. history toward the library shelves” where the books on U.S. colonies reside. That is my hope, too. I am grateful to her for writing a review that highlights what a rich trove of scholarship sits upon those shelves.

[1] Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), census: 12–13, 78–79; presidents: see especially 4–7 and 111–112; Supreme Court, 83–87.

[2] Ibid., 83–87, plus later references to the Insular Cases at 104, 257, and 394–395.

[3] Christina Duffy Burnett, “Untied States: American Expansion and Territorial Deannexation,” University of Chicago Law Review 72 (2005): 801. The author now goes by Christina Duffy Ponsa-Kraus.

[4] Immerwahr, How to Hide, 177. The most extensive coverage of this episode is Harry N. Scheiber and Jane L. Scheiber, Bayonets in Paradise: Martial Law in Hawai‘i during World War II (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016).

[5] Macpherson says that Hawai‘i and Alaska were “always incorporated territories on a path to statehood.” This statement is false in two ways. First, Hawai‘i and Alaska were annexed before the Supreme Court ruled them incorporated—decades before in Alaska’s case. Second, it was far from clear in the early twentieth century that either would become a state. Both territories had majority nonwhite populations, and there was strong racist resistance to admitting either to the union. See, for example, Eric Love, “White is the Color of Empire: The Annexation of Hawaii in 1898,” in Race, Nation, and Empire in American History, ed. James T. Campbell, Matthew Pratt Guterl, and Robert G. Lee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 75–102.

[6] The importance of placing settler colonialism and overseas empire together analytically is emphasized in Alyosha Goldstein, ed., Formations of United States Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) and a helpful recent example is Katharine Bjork, Prairie Imperialists: The Indian Country Origins of American Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).

[7] Key works on bases particularly are Catherine Lutz, ed., The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts (New York: New York University Press, 2009) and David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015). A terrific reflection on the other point-like spaces within the U.S. territorial empire is Ruth Oldenziel, “Islands: The United States as a Networked Empire,” in Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011), 13–42.

[8] José Amador, Medicine and Nation Building in the Americas, 1890–1940 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015); Michael E. Donoghue, Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

[9] Macpherson takes me to task for a radio interview in which I said that Puerto Rico had a “constitutional change” in 1952 and became a commonwealth. “There was no constitutional change,” she insists, as if correcting a factual error. This strikes me as a bad-faith reading. Puerto Rico got a new constitution in 1952, which is what I was talking about. Macpherson, ignoring the most plausible interpretation of my words, objects because in her view 1952 did not alter Puerto Rico’s standing under the U.S. Constitution.

[10] Immerwahr, How to Hide, 257, 258.

[11] Ibid., 400. Macpherson has two smaller, cross-cutting interpretive concerns: first she objects that I focus on nationalism and violence at the expense of “party politics” and then, two paragraphs later, she protests that I “hide” the harsh incarceration of nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos in the post-1952 period, thus concealing the brutality that undergirded the smooth operation of party politics. Actually, I devote two paragraphs to Albizu’s incarceration (p. 259), and do so in the context of a larger discussion of Puerto Rican party politics beyond violent nationalism.

[12] Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[13] Lanny Thompson, Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010).

[14] Alvita Akiboh, “Pocket-Sized Imperialism: U.S. Designs on Colonial Currency,” Diplomatic History 41 (2017): 874–902; 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): 123–145.