"How to Hide an Empire"

Once in a very long while a book comes along to tie a lot of other books I've read together masterfully. This one by Daniel Immerwahr undoubtedly belongs in this rare category.  ("The Path Between the Seas", vallennox's "Bomber's Moon", "Cryptonomicon", "The Devil in the White City", "The Bomber Mafia", to name a few.)

• Nor did it stop there. The event familiarly known as “Pearl Harbor” was in fact an all-out lightning strike on U.S. and British holdings throughout the Pacific. On a single day, the Japanese attacked the U.S. territories of Hawai‘i, the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island, and Wake Island. They also attacked the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and they invaded Thailand.
• Roosevelt clearly worried that his audience might regard Hawai‘i as foreign. So on the morning of his speech, he made another edit. He changed it so that the Japanese squadrons had bombed not the “island of Oahu,” but the “American island of Oahu.” Damage there, Roosevelt continued, had been done to “American naval and military forces,” and “very many American lives” had been lost. <> An American island, where American lives were lost—that was the point he was trying to make. If the Philippines was being rounded down to foreign, Hawai‘i was being rounded up to “American.”
• the Hawaiian island chain—the whole chain, not just the eight main islands shown on most maps—if superimposed on the mainland would stretch almost from Florida to California.
• If you lived in the United States on the eve of World War II, in other words, you were more likely to be colonized than black, by odds of three to two.
• What getting the Greater United States in view reveals is that race has been even more central to U.S. history than is usually supposed. It hasn’t just been about black and white, but about Filipino, Hawaiian, Samoan, and Chamoru (from Guam), too, among other identities. Race has not only shaped lives, it’s shaped the country itself—where the borders went, who has counted as “American.”
• And so, as with the logo map, the country was left with a strategically cropped family photo. Readers of the 1940 census..
• Well-worn cultural artifacts—the musical Oklahoma!, the moon landing, Godzilla, the peace symbol—took on new significance. Obscure historical episodes that I’d barely registered now seemed tremendously important. I found myself collaring defenseless colleagues in the halls to deliver the news. “Did you know that nationalists staged a seven-city revolt in Puerto Rico, culminating in an assassination attempt on Harry Truman? And that the same nationalists shot up Congress four years later?”
• Collectively, these technologies weaned the United States off the familiar model of formal empire. They replaced colonization with globalization... Dramatically, and in just a few years, the military built a world-spanning logistical network that was startling in how little it depended on colonies. It was also startling in how much it centered the world’s trade, transport, and communication on one country, the United States.
• It even fights empires in its dreams. Star Wars, a saga that started with a rebellion against the Galactic Empire, is one of the highest-grossing film franchises of all time.
  This self-image of the United States as a republic is consoling, but it’s also costly. Most of the cost has been paid by those living in the colonies, in the occupation zones, and around the military bases. The logo map has relegated them to the shadows, which are a dangerous place to live. At various times, the inhabitants of the U.S. Empire have been shot, shelled, starved, interned, dispossessed, tortured, and experimented on. What they haven’t been, by and large, is seen.

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• Washington set his affairs in order, but he remained doubtful about westerners’ political allegiances. His fears were confirmed in the 1790s, when backcountry men in Pennsylvania refused to pay a federal tax on alcohol and threatened armed secession. It was the Boston Tea Party all over again, this time with whiskey. Yet, notwithstanding his own recent leadership of a revolution against the financial machinations of a distant government, Washington’s sympathy for the rebels quickly ran dry... But the episode remains, as the historian Joseph Ellis has observed, the “first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field.”
• Washington’s impatience with frontiersmen didn’t mean that he opposed expansion. In the long term, he depended on it, both to strengthen the country and to profit from his western estates. The issue was the short term. The country was vast, but its government was weak. Squatters who rushed over the mountains were impossible to govern, and the wars they inevitably started were expensive to fight. Washington thus insisted that settlement proceed in a “compact” manner, under elite control.
• Moreover, Congress’s discretionary authority meant that until territories became states, the federal government held absolute power over them. Initially, territories were to be ruled by an appointed governor and three judges. Even after they gained legislatures, the governor retained the power to veto bills and dissolve the legislature.
  “In effect,” wrote James Monroe, who drafted the ordinance, it was “a colonial government similar to that which prevail’d in these States previous to the revolution.” Jefferson conceded that the first stage resembled a “despotic oligarchy."
• Ben Franklin was the first to notice it. In 1749 he organized a census of Philadelphia and began to collect population numbers on Boston, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. What he saw was startling. Not only was the colonial population growing, it was doubling once every twenty-five years. If that continued, Franklin predicted (with more than a little giddiness), in a century colonial North America would contain more Englishmen than Britain itself.
  The grim prediction by the economist Thomas Malthus that food supply could never keep pace with population growth was largely based on Franklin’s North American calculations
  A hundred years later, the 1890 census registered that the population had increased sixteenfold—i.e., a doubling every twenty-five years—Franklin had been off by less than one-seventh of a percent.
• “Wave after wave has rolled on,” wrote a nervous Ojibwe thinker, “till now there appears no limit to the sea of population.”
  You could see it in the cities the settlers built. Cincinnati, a village in 1810, had a nine-story steam-powered mill by 1815 and a fleet of 150 steamboats by 1830. Chicago grew from a settlement of fewer than a hundred people (and fourteen taxpayers) in 1830 to a towering megalopolis with the world’s first dense cluster of skyscrapers and more than a million residents in 1890—despite having burned to the ground in 1871.
• As squatters became pioneers, Daniel Boone’s reputation surged. After his death, he was retroactively claimed as an honorary founding father.
• Not only were the Cherokees growing, they were carving out a place for themselves within the new republic by adopting aspects of European culture. They ran plantations, bought slaves, and built a capital (“It’s like Baltimore,” a leading Cherokee bragged). A silversmith named Sequoyah designed a syllabary, turning Cherokee into a written language. It caught on quickly with help from the tribe’s newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, published in both English and Cherokee. In 1827 the Cherokee Nation adopted a constitution,
  But by doubling down on Europeanization, the Cherokees were calling the government’s bluff. They were “civilized” by every rule of white society. So shouldn’t their land claims be respected?
• Thomas Jefferson had fantasized about dividing the entire country, with Native on one side and European on the other—hence his plan for the Louisiana Purchase. By reserving most of the new territory for Indians, he could free up land in the East for whites. <> For the first few decades of the country’s history, this continental-scale apartheid had remained informal and incomplete.
• It was as if someone had depopulated most of Europe and shunted remnants from each country to an allotment in Romania. <> And yet, even this compressed neutron star of Indian polities was vulnerable to incursions. There was talk of organizing it into a territory, as had been done with Kansas and Nebraska. And, as in those two territories, whites started pouring in illegally.
• When, in the last act, a federal marshal appears on the scene, the characters refuse to cooperate with him, explaining that they are “jist plumb full of Indian blood” and that they regard the United States as a “furrin country.” With that uneasy confrontation, the curtain falls. <> Riggs’s play was well received when it debuted in 1931. Today, however, it is remembered less on its own merits than as the basis for the musical Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. “I kept most of the lines of the original play without making any changes in them, for the simple reason that they could not be improved upon—at least not by me,” Hammerstein told the press. <> Yet there was one noticeable change. Though the musical concludes with a confrontation with a marshal (it ends happily), the characters in Oklahoma! say nothing about having “Indian blood.” Indeed, the word Indian is not uttered once in the production.

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• Guano entrepreneurs hastily formed the American Guano Company, with a capitalization of $10 million (a number that grows more impressive once you realize that all federal expenditures in 1850 totaled less than $45 million).
• What Cooper had failed to grasp is that guano accumulated only in extremely dry climates, oceanic deserts where the lack of rainfall allowed bird droppings to collect for centuries. Such islands were barren rocks, not fertile plains—unpromising sites for human habitation. <> Still, the guano didn’t hop onto the ships by itself. Guano mining—tunneling, picking, and blasting the stuff loose and hauling it to waiting ships—was arguably the single worst job you could have in the nineteenth century. It offered all the backbreaking labor and lung damage of coal mining, but to do the job, you had to be marooned on a hot, dry, pestilential, and foul-smelling island for months.
• By 1914, the experimental technique had become industrially viable, and in that year Haber’s method, called the Haber–Bosch process, yielded as much reactive nitrogen as the entire Peruvian guano trade... In a single stroke, Haber had opened the floodgates for the virtually unlimited growth of human life. The Malthusian logic was repealed. Soil exhaustion ceased to be an existential threat;
• It was a Picture of Dorian Gray marriage: the more Fritz flourished, the more Clara withered. Just as her husband was honing his invention, Clara wrote an anguished letter to her former scientific mentor: “What Fritz has gained in these last eight years, that—and even more—I have lost, and what is left of me fills with the deepest dissatisfaction.”
• When World War I erupted, Haber volunteered his services. He suggested that the ammonia now pouring out of German fertilizer plants could be repurposed as explosives to bolster Germany’s dwindling munitions supplies. Since the war had cut Germany off from imported nitrates, this was an essential contribution. The president of the American Chemical Society calculated that Germany would have lost the war by early 1916 had Haber not replenished its stocks of nitrate explosives.
• Not only did Haber invent it, he personally supervised its debut in 1915, releasing four hundred thousand tons of chlorine gas upwind of some Algerian troops at the Battle of Ypres. In a delicious historical irony, the man who saved the world from starvation was also the father of weapons of mass destruction.
• The make-believe element reached its peak in his Boone and Crockett Club, a national organization that championed “manliness, self-reliance, and a capacity for self-help” by promoting hunting. It principally drew eastern men of affairs—the banker J. P. Morgan, the politicians Elihu Root and Henry Stimson, and the Philadelphia-born, Paris- and Harvard-educated author Owen Wister, whose cowboy novel The Virginian (dedicated to Roosevelt) established the genre of the “Western.”
• What Roosevelt and Turner had noticed was a fact not just about the United States, but about the world. For industrializing societies, the nineteenth century had been one of relatively easy expansion. The United States spread west, Russia spread east, and the European powers turned south, toward colonies in Asia and Africa.
• Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, of the Naval War College. Mahan’s lengthy 1890 treatise, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, was hardly a page-turner, but it contained a powerful suggestion. If, according to Turner, the land was closed, Mahan noted that the seas were open.
• The more that countries industrialized, the more they depended on the produce of distant locales. They found themselves needing rubber from Southeast Asia, jute from India (for packaging), palm oil from West Africa (an industrial lubricant), tungsten from Korea (for lightbulb filaments), and copper from South America. At times, the Industrial Revolution could look like a worldwide scavenger hunt for obscure tropical products.
• A casual observer might have wondered why a revolution in Cuba required the attentions of the Asiatic Squadron. But Roosevelt, emboldened by Mahan, envisioned an all-out attack on the Spanish Empire. He hoped that if war came, “Dewey could be slipped like a wolfhound from a leash.” He thus ordered the commodore to amass his ships in Hong Kong and, in the event of war, attack the Philippines. <> Secretary Long had instructed Roosevelt to “look after the routine of the office while I get a quiet day off.” When he returned, he was astounded to find that his subordinate had instead laid the groundwork for a transoceanic war. Nevertheless, probably fearful of taking any action that the newspapers might interpret as weakness, Long allowed Roosevelt’s orders to stand.
• at a campaign event, Roosevelt got shot in the chest at close range and then proceeded to give his intended speech for an hour as the blood ran from his body.
• Looking back to see no one following, Roosevelt ran back to Kettle Hill (still under fire), hopped back over the fence, and berated his troops. Now, with his men finally behind him, he crossed the fence a third time, crested the hill, and killed a Spaniard with his Maine-salvaged revolver. <> Right after that, with the Spaniards subdued, Roosevelt and the Rough Riders repeated their charge for the benefit of a film crew—the first documentary battle footage ever shot.
• That judgment, which was shared widely, mattered. Feeling that Cubans had contributed little to the war, U.S. commanders felt no compunctions about sidelining them from the peace. Thus did they negotiate first the surrender of Santiago and then of Cuba directly with Spain, excluding the Cubans.
• Aguinaldo understood all this to be part of the independence war of the Philippines, and in fact had already issued a declaration of independence, raised a flag, and played the Philippine national anthem. Yet, as in Cuba, Spain surrendered to the United States, not the local rebels.
• The United States annexed the thinly populated northern part of Mexico (including present-day California, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) but let the populous southern part go. This carefully drawn border gave the United States, as one newspaper put it, “all the territory of value that we can get without taking the people.” <> A few wished to go farther. Some proslavery advocates, worried that the booming white settler population might crowd out slavery, sought room for their way of life farther south. They staged a series of “filibusters,” private invasions of Latin American republics that, they hoped, would lead to annexations. The most dramatic was William Walker’s invasion of Nicaragua in 1855, which improbably propelled Walker briefly to the Nicaraguan presidency.
  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.
• The U.S. census did not count them. This was the flip side to the careful annexations, another way to control who was part of the country and who wasn’t. From the start, the census had declined to count most indigenous people. Thus, for more than a century, a government that had reliable decennial tallies of its toymakers and chimney sweeps, of its cows and its horses, could not say how many Indians lived within its borders.
• The Insular Cases are far less well-known. Until very recently, it was not unusual for constitutional scholars to have never heard of them. But they are nevertheless still on the books, and they are still cited as good law. The court has repeatedly upheld the principle that the Constitution applies to some parts of the country but not others. That’s why a citizen on the mainland has a constitutional right to trial by jury, but when that citizen travels to Puerto Rico, the right vanishes.
  Similarly, the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee to anyone born in the United States doesn’t apply to the unincorporated territories. In them, citizenship came late and only after struggle. What is more, it arrived as “statutory citizenship,” meaning that it was secured by legislation rather than by the Constitution and could therefore be rescinded.
• A galling gun shortage would cripple the Philippine forces throughout the war. Aguinaldo’s men made do with whatever weapons they could smuggle from Asia (not many, given the U.S. blockade) or capture. They gathered tin cans that the U.S. Army had discarded and tried to convert them into cartridges. They melted church bells down for bullets, scraped the heads off matches for fulminate, and used tree resins for gunpowder. Later in the war, independence fighters sent pearl divers to scour the ocean floor for ammunition that the retreating Spaniards might have dropped.
• And their leaders were astonishingly young... Tinio had dropped out of high school to join the revolution in 1896, and two years later he was a general. His aide-de-camp was 15. <> Aguinaldo himself was 29 in 1898. He lived until 1964. <> This hatchling army fared poorly against the armed forces of the United States.
• The imperial policy was affirmed, and it would never arise as a serious electoral issue again. <> Twain felt the ground shift beneath his feet. Though he continued to criticize imperialism, he kept his most incisive writings private, as he could find no way to publish them. After Twain died, in 1910, his literary estate suppressed them.
• Too clumsy to excise the rebellion with a scalpel, the army reached for a bone saw. Adopting a practice called “reconcentration,” it herded rural populations into fortified towns or camps where they could be more closely monitored. From the army’s perspective, this contributed a satisfying clarity to an otherwise murky situation. Those inside the reconcentration zones were “pacified.” Those outside were not, and could be treated accordingly: cutting off their food supplies, burning their homes, or simply shooting them. <> Somewhat awkwardly, though, reconcentration was the very tactic that Spain had used against the Cubans, the one that had provoked the United States to “liberate” Cuba in the first place.
• Everyone, that is, but the U.S. soldiers. They sucked much of the rice, eggs, chickens, fruit, fish, and meat from the Philippine economy with their purchase orders. And after there was no longer enough meat left in the Philippine economy, the army bought refrigerated beef from Australia. With vaccines, fresh water, sanitation, and ample food, U.S. forces were only grazed by the diseases that decimated the colony.
• Roosevelt’s announcement wasn’t the first time the authorities had declared an end to the war. It wasn’t even the second time. The Washington Post reminded readers that Taft had announced the “fourth and final termination of hostilities” two years earlier and that “the war has been brought to an end on six different occasions since.”
  “A bad thing cannot be killed too often,” the paper concluded.
• Every one of the army’s first twelve chiefs of staff, in fact, served in the Philippine War. Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought.

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• The man who decided when Cuba was pacified was its military governor, none other than Leonard Wood, Roosevelt’s fellow Rough Rider and (later) the orchestrator of the Bud Dajo Massacre in the Philippines. As Wood saw it, Cuba wouldn’t be pacified until it had a stable government. And what was a stable government? One in which “money can be borrowed at a reasonable rate of interest” and “capital is willing to invest” was Wood’s definition. He wrote to McKinley: “When people ask me what I mean by stable government, I tell them ‘Money at six percent.’”
• Using the threat of continued military occupation as leverage, Wood got the Cuban legislature to agree to both demands—not only agree to them but write them into law. For more than thirty years the Cuban constitution contained an astonishing clause granting the United States the right to invade Cuba (which it did, four times).
• (Guantánamo Bay:) This was, to put it mildly, an extraordinary deal. It gave the United States many of the benefits of colonization without the responsibility. Nobody had sought this arrangement—it was a work-around designed to circumvent the restrictions anti-imperialists had enacted. But it opened a fork in history: the Philippines, Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Guam went one way; Cuba went another.
• Instead, Roosevelt made a Cuba-style deal. His government would gain temporary control of Dominican finances (thus ensuring repayment of the debt to U.S. banks) in exchange for defending the Morales government from rebels and external enemies. U.S. interests would be protected, and the Dominican Republic would remain independent. <> The ploy was used repeatedly, in country after country around the Caribbean. The United States seized the levers of finance and trade but left sovereignty formally intact. “Dollar diplomacy” was the polite name for this, though “gunboat diplomacy” was the more accurate euphemism.
• Wilson didn’t think of nonwhites as subhuman, as some around him did. But he regarded many of them as “children,” requiring “training” before they could rule themselves. The nightmare scenario, in his mind, was that the children might gain power they weren’t ready to wield... As he saw it, the brief participation of African Americans in politics had left a wound “incomparably deeper, incomparably more difficult to undo” than the war itself had.
• That was how Thomas Dixon Jr., Wilson’s close friend and former classmate, saw the Klan, too. Dixon wrote his own work on this theme, a novel entitled The Clansman, which was quickly adapted into a stage play. In 1915 Dixon and the director D. W. Griffith used the novel as the basis for a film, The Birth of a Nation. It was an epic history about the South’s redemption by the Ku Klux Klan. And it quoted Wilson’s historical writings in its title cards.
• The Japanese delegation asked to at least insert language about racial equality into the League of Nations covenant. This proposal had a majority of votes behind it—the French delegation deemed the cause “indisputable.” But Wilson blocked it, refusing to let even the principle of racial equality stand. <> It would be hard to overstate the consequences of these dashed hopes on the colonized world. The year 1919 was, for the colonies, when the switch was thrown, when nationalist movements abandoned polite petitioning.


• Such animosity meant little to U.S. leaders at the time—they didn’t have much business in places like Egypt and Korea. But later it would come to mean a great deal. The Chinese protester complaining of “robbers” in Paris—that was a young Mao Zedong. Nguyen the Patriot also gained renown, although by another name: Ho Chi Minh. That Egyptian boy reciting poems and making speeches was Sayyid Qutb, a leading Islamist thinker who would become the key inspiration for Osama bin Laden.

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• One of the blockbusters of the age was a work of science fiction, Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy. It imagined a man falling asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakening in the year 2000 to a luminously bright future, a future where everything worked. <> Bellamy’s prophecies were exhilarating. Consumers, he predicted, would no longer buy goods in stores. They’d place orders into pneumatic tubes, using what he called “credit cards,” and their purchases would come whooshing back via the same tubes. For a small fee, they could even have music piped into their homes as if it were water.
• This was how it went in the Progressive Era. In one corner stood reformers, intent on imposing order. In the other, a discordant multitude of crosscutting interests and publics. It wasn’t just architecture. From battleground to battleground—politics, public health, the factory floor—the war raged on. <> Yet there was one arena where the fight was markedly less fair, where social engineers indisputably held the upper hand: the empire. Although the overseas territories had dropped off the maps, they were, for a certain type of professional, extremely interesting places. They functioned as laboratories, spaces for bold experimentation where ideas could be tried with practically no resistance, oversight, or consequences.
• Still, once in a while, someone slipped into the role of sahib and played it to pith-hatted perfection. In the Philippines, that someone was Cameron Forbes. He delighted in life in the tropics: the exotic Orient, the attentive servants, the languid lifestyle.
• but the Manila that Burnham encountered in 1904 had been badly mauled by the forces of history. Its timeline read like a book of the Old Testament: 1899, war; 1901, bubonic plague; 1902, cholera and rinderpest; 1903, the “Great Fire.”
• In its acknowledgments, his Plan of Chicago, which took two years and a staff of dozens to produce, thanked 312 people for their help. <> Burnham needed that help. The Chicago plan was by necessity a group effort in both conception and implementation. Carrying it out would take decades.
• No living Filipino warranted mention in his letters, in his diary, or in the plan itself. In all, Burnham worked on his plan for six months, and that left time for travel, tourism, and his simultaneous work in Baguio. <> Burnham could never have gotten away with such haste in Chicago. In Manila, however, it was fine. Three days after the government approved his plan (with no changes), construction began.
• It didn’t take long before Parsons began worrying about the “large and rapidly increasing number of buildings” under his supervision. One solution would have been to delegate. Instead, he standardized. Schoolhouses, markets, hospitals, and even provincial capitols could simply be duplicated.
• Manila offered him a relatively free hand, but Baguio was to be built, like the White City, entirely from scratch. Burnham saw it as his chance “to formulate my plans untrammeled by any but natural conditions.” <> The idea of a summer capital was not new. European colonizers had built a series of hill stations, most famously Shimla in India, where Rudyard Kipling summered and from which the British ruled during the hot months.
• The architecture of power, plus golf: that summed it up well. Though technically Baguio was a command center—the part-time capital of the United States’ great Asian colony—it was also a retreat.
• None of this was cheap. The road alone cost $2 million by the time it opened in 1905—a tenth of what the United States had paid Spain to buy the Philippines. And that didn’t count the expensive repairs required every time a monsoon washed parts of the road away, or the many lives lost building it.
• It’s hard to imagine a habitat as congenial to hookworms as a trans-Alp tunnel, but Puerto Rico came surprisingly close. Not only was the island densely populated, but nearly two-thirds of Puerto Ricans lived in the highlands, where coffee was king. The coffee plantations lacked privies, the workers toiled barefoot, and the harvest was during the rainy season—providing a pretty good approximation of the hot, moist, shaded, and well-trafficked soil of the tunnel.
• Again, the veil lifted. Is that where the “lazy white Southerner” stereotype came from? Is that why Southern whites looked funny—lanky, pale, and slack? Page introduced Stiles to John D. Rockefeller’s aide, who arranged for the oil baron to give a million dollars to deworm the South. This was an early venture by Rockefeller into philanthropy, which would culminate in the establishment of the Rockefeller Foundation.
• Yet the manner in which the two campaigns were carried out was a study in contrast, one that says much about how things worked in the colonies. <> In the Southern campaign, the Rockefeller men took great care to avoid offending public sensibilities. Instead of sending their own doctors, they worked with state boards of health and employed local doctors—all white. They courted newspaper editors. And they adopted a familiar cultural form for their campaign: the Southern tent revival.
• Puerto Rico was densely populated—that’s one reason why hookworm spread so easily. But it wasn’t any more so in 1930 than New Jersey was. Still, the fingers pointed and heads shook. The governor believed that restricting births “among the lower and more ignorant elements of the population” was “the only salvation for the Island.”
• His methods differed from Ashford’s, too. Ashford had always been cautious about medical experiments. The first time he administered a deworming pill, he stayed up all night making “nervous half-hour visits” until he saw that his patient was unharmed. Rhoads, by contrast, appeared to regard Puerto Rico as an island-size laboratory. He saw the empire much as Daniel Burnham had: a place to try out ideas while facing few consequences.
• Clandestine villainy, an incriminating letter—it was straight out of a nineteenth-century novel. In another novelistic twist, Rhoads composed his letter at the desk of a hospital stenographer and then accidentally left it there. It circulated swiftly among the Puerto Rican staff. A lab assistant, Luis Baldoni, sent the purloined letter to his home in Utuado, a four-hour drive away... He pressed a “loan” on Baldoni. And then he left for New York, never to return.
• Many in the 1930s thought so, too. Puerto Ricans had felt the condescension and scorn of mainlanders. They’d heard the talk about “overpopulation.” And now there was this letter—a killer’s clear confession—and yet no trial. The whole thing seemed to confirm the worst fears about U.S. imperialism. That a doctor would murder his patients out of racial hatred—to many, it seemed plausible. <> The Rhoads affair was a turning point in Puerto Rican politics. Before the letter, the Nationalists were an obscure group. After it, they were a force.
• Albizu’s birthplace, once known for being “delirious” with enthusiasm for the United States, was now etched in memory as the site of the Ponce Massacre. To this day, it remains the bloodiest shooting by police in U.S. history.
• Beyond the experimental use of Puerto Ricans in racial tests, the Chemical Warfare Service relied on them for field tests at its “jungle” testing site: San José Island off Panama, an entire island for testing chemical weapons. The Puerto Ricans weren’t brought there because of their race per se. They were brought because they were easy to get.
• For Rhoads, this was just the beginning. Scientists had known from the start of the war that mustard agents—the main chemicals with which Rhoads was working—targeted lymphoid tissue and bone marrow. Perhaps they could be used to treat lymphoma?
• Today, Cornelius Rhoads lives in Puerto Rican memory as a villain. On the mainland, however, he’s been remembered differently: as a pioneer of chemotherapy... Rhoads recipients have gone on to be field leaders; one was a Nobel laureate. But so complete was the informational segregation between Puerto Rico and the mainland that the prize was given for twenty-three years before anyone objected.