The Not - Quite States of America by Doug Mack

Author:Doug Mack
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

THERE WAS a question that was starting to bother me: How, when, and why did the issue of the territories fall out of the conversation back in the states?

Back around 1900, of course, the issue of overseas expansion, and the very existence of long-term territories, had been an issue of considerable national debate, at times the central issue of debate. Since then, from Guam’s battlefields and beyond, the territories—even the tiny islands—had played an unmistakably important role in American history and in making the USA what it is today, a global power. An empire. And this empire had been assembled with purpose; contrary to what Time magazine publisher Henry Luce wrote in his seminal 1941 article “The American Century,” it was not something that happened “blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves.” There was plenty of bumbling, to be sure, but also lots of planning and goal-setting, for the very reason that the territories were firmly on the national agenda.

Today, people in the territories still ponder their relationship to the United States, constantly. For them, the question of what it means to be American is not an academic abstraction but a matter of everyday import.

But for those of us back in the states, at some point, the territories seemingly just disappeared. In the introduction to his 2013 book The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects, author Richard Kurin—the Smithsonian Institution’s undersecretary for history, art, and culture—uses the steering wheel of the USS Maine to illustrate that sometimes an artifact’s “meaning as a museum object changes.” Kurin writes that initially the steering wheel “was put in a place of honor in the museum as a sacred, patriotic object. Over the years, the fervor that fueled its treatment subsided, and now it is relegated to distant storage.” Unintentionally illustrating this point, in Kurin’s own book the several pages of maps in the endpapers omit the territories.

So how did the territories go from a subject that was “impossible to avoid,” as the Atlantic put it in 1898, to an utter afterthought? I was starting to develop an answer, or at least the beginnings of an answer. There were a few different factors on my list so far.

First, each territory, and even the Minor Outlying Islands, held some particular strategic importance for the U.S. military and commercial interests: coaling stations, plantations, other resources, control of the sea. But in large part, expansion was an end unto itself, a way of flexing the national muscles. When William McKinley won the 1900 election, granting a tacit approval for the nation to take the path of empire, he was given no particular mandate on what to do with that empire. The point was simply to create it, to check that box and say, Yes, we are an empire, a global power, without much concern of the follow-up question of, “Now what?”

But soon the United States did, in fact, have to consider what to make of its latest possessions, and here we come to the second factor: the Insular Cases.

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