Throughline - Becoming America

Episode Date: February 13, 2020

When the United States of America was founded, it was only a union of a small number of states. By the beginning of the 20th century, the United States had become an empire; with states and territories and colonies that spanned the globe. As a result, the country began to not only reconsider its place in the world, but also its very name.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. In 1898, the United States made a crucial decision to join a war against another world power, Spain. It began in the Caribbean with two Spanish imperial territories, Cuba and Puerto Rico. The United States military provided support to rebels and engaged directly in the fight

to help these nations gain independence. Then the U.S. got involved in another rebellion, in another Spanish territory. This time, it was a nation on the other side of the world. The Philippines. The U.S. sent troops and aid to help Filipino revolutionaries. The Filipino Provisional Government chose the colors red, white, and blue for their flag, the symbol of their appreciation. But it wouldn't take long for those feelings to change.

Suddenly, very confusingly, the United States takes the Philippines from Spain. Ends the war with a treaty at which no Filipinos were present for the negotiation, where it, for 20 million dollars, purchases the Philippines from Spain. This is Daniel Imervar. I wrote a book called How to Hide an Empire, a history of the greater United States. I wrote a book called How to Hide an Empire, a History of the Greater United States. He's a history professor at Northwestern University. You know, you can imagine the dashed

hopes of people who'd been fighting for independence suddenly have to realize they have to do it again. And they do do it again. It should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines. By assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties

which is the heritage of free peoples and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. President William McKinley. In February 1899, Filipinos began a new fight for independence, this time against the United States. And it becomes a war that just consumes so many lives. a new fight for independence, this time against the United States. And it becomes a war that just consumes so many lives.

I hope that when they are conquered, they will be made to see for many years the iron hand of military rule, the only kind for which they are suited. The United States is burning villages. I think the island's a most valuable acquisition. Their natural resources are almost beyond computation. General Frederick Funston. U.S. forces are concentrating people in camps or garrison towns

where they're cut off from food supplies. It's torturing people with a kind of water-based torture that bears a discomforting resemblance to waterboarding today. Back then it was called the water cure, where dirty water was put into insurgents' mouths or suspected insurgents' mouths until they just sort of couldn't take it anymore. And it becomes a scandalous war. Teddy Roosevelt, who of course would later become president, said this about Filipinos. So far as I'm aware, not one competent witness who has actually known the facts believes the Filipinos capable of self-government at present

or believes that such an effort would result in anything but a horrible confusion of tyranny and anarchy. The institutions of a free republic cannot at a leap be transplanted into wholly alien soil among a people who have not the slightest conception of liberty and self-government, as we use those words. You might as well try to transplant a full-grown oak into alien soil. What people quickly see back in the U.S. mainland and all over the world are accounts and photographs of, you know, trenches full of Filipino corpses and Filipino nationalists who are seeking independence, getting tortured and killed. And that's really hard to understand how that's compatible

with the animating virtues of the United States, the core values of the country, at least the core values that had been articulated in 1776. That war drags on, it just does not end, and it drags on basically until 1913. So from 1899 to 1913, it only was recently surpassed by Afghanistan as the longest war the United States has ever fought. We think that that war killed some three quarters of a million people.

The U.S. was taking control of nations across the world. It annexed Guam and Hawaii, and this brought up an identity crisis. So, you know, for all the talk about the United States of extending liberty, this stuff makes headlines, and it impinges on the consciousness of mainlanders such that it becomes harder to think of the United States as just a contiguous collection of states

because it's quite obvious that the U.S. flag is flying in all sorts of places. The sudden move towards imperial expansion in the late 19th century and the bloody, scandalous conflict in the Philippines caused the United States to redefine its identity, its place in the world, and even to reconsider its own name. This is Vanessa Quinones calling from Sedonia, Wisconsin, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. I want you guys to know that I think you're amazing. Keep up the great work.

This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Hey, I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adab-Louie. And on this episode, when the United States became America. We are in the midst of another election year. And the word America is going to be thrown around by every candidate ad nauseum.

You can hear it, right? God bless America. American values. America is a shining city upon a hill. Make America great again. And that got us wondering, why do we even call ourselves that? America. There are two entire continents named America. So how did it become the name of the United States? When Daniel Imavar was writing How to Hide an Empire, he noticed something. At some point in the late 19th century, around the time of the Filipino-American War, the name for the United States sort of changed. I did not go into this having any thought that the name of the country had changed at all.

I mean, you know, I got a doctoral degree in U.S. history, and at no point had I read anything about that. I'd always been interested in the fact that the common shorthand, at least, you know, that I was familiar with for the United States was America. And I was sort of aware that that was something that would piss people from other parts of the Americas off reliably. But I just assumed that was there from the get-go. So I had this kind of amazing moment where I was in the Library of Congress, which one of the great things about the Library of Congress is not just all the manuscript and archival collections they have.

It's also that it is a repository library, which means that pretty much every book published is there. So I had this great experience where I was just plowing through books from around the time when the United States takes a number of overseas territories. And I found one that was written by a British writer. He said, you know, it's really funny because before 1898, we would always refer to the United States as America. And we were constantly getting corrected. Like, and people would always say, no, no, no, no, no, America is not the name of our country. It is the United States. Don't call it America. That's wrong. Don't get it twisted.

And then the author said, and then the war with Spain happened in 1898. And now it's like exactly the opposite. Now, whenever we refer to the country as the United States, we get corrected the other way. And they say, no, no, no, we call it America. That's how we've always called it. That's how we think of the country. And I read that and I thought, that can't possibly be true. And then I looked. And I thought, oh, my God, that's right. Wow. Another way that you can see it, and this kind of stunned me, is I looked at all of the anthems I could find about the United States. And so it would be like, you know, these are familiar to us today. Yankee Doodle, Hail to the Chief. My Country Tis of Thee, Battle Cry of Freedom. Same deal, other side.

Battle Hymn of the Republic, Stars and Stripes Forever, and the Star-Spangled Banner. These are all 19th century or 18th century songs that people sang about the United States. Not a single one of them mentions the word America in its lyrics. The national anthem, Star Spangled Banner, does not refer to America at any point. Like, you might not know which country it's being referred to because the name of the country, at least the name that I was familiar with, is nowhere in the lyrics

to this. America the Beautiful and God Bless America, those are happens, you know, after 1898, I'm wondering how far back this tension around the name goes. Like, like, was this a problem from the time the country was founded? Right. So when the United States is founded, it gets a name, and the name is the United States of America. From the get-go, there are two problems with a name. Problem one is it's kind of a mouthful. And the reason it's kind of a mouthful is that it's trying to distinguish this new country from the broader hemisphere, which is, of course, the Americas. And this is a country within that, which doesn't include all of that, but is part of it.

It's the United States of America. You know, then that introduces some real problems about how do you refer to it colloquially? Ten syllables is quite a lot, and that's not how people are going to refer to it on a daily basis. So from the get-go, there are arguments about, well, should we just shorten it? Should we call it Fredonia? And maybe the people could be called Fredonians or something like that, or Friedisch, like Swedish. Why Fredonia, though? It seems so random, Fredonia. Well, it's the free land. It's the land of free people.

The Friedish, if you will. The other problem with it is that it's a descriptive label. It tells you what the country is. It's the label on the tin. And it says that this country is a union of states. At the very beginning, when the name is first proposed, it does seem like it's going to be a union of states. But by the time the United States actually legally wins its independence from Great Britain and the treaty is ratified on both sides, the name is no longer accurate.

Because by that time, the United States has mutated a little bit, such that it is now no longer just consisting of states. It actually consists of states and territories. So the word union isn't quite right. Union implies a sort of voluntary entered into status, so a marriage is a union in that way. When you've got territories that didn't consent to join, union isn't quite right. And then, of course, it's not a union of states. It's a collection of states and territories. What does it say about sort of the founders and the principles

that they kind of imbued in this name? I mean, they decided to call it, like you said, a mouthful, the United States of America. Why do you think that they decided to go with that? What were they hoping to convey with that? I don't have a great answer, but one thought would be that the nationness of this place was in dispute from the get-go. I mean, it wasn't clear that people from Georgia and people from New York and people from Pennsylvania really considered themselves to be part of the same nation, a single people. And the title United States signals that, right? These are different states.

States is usually the word we use or the word they used for whole countries. So this is a union of separate countries. And I think the complicated name sort of gets at that. When we come back, how the identity of the United States evolves as it builds an empire. Hi, this is Guy from Israel, also known as Palestine, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. You know, one thing that really caught my attention was the nickname Columbia for the United States. Why did people refer to the U.S. as Columbia? Like, what did that even mean? So this is from this nice moment in the early republic when people feel that the name is negotiable

and are casting around for names that sort of, you know, fit better in a poem, for example, that just sort of have a kind of romanticism to them. So Fredonia is one option. Columbia, like the District of Columbia, tends to be a far more common option. And so you might ask, why Colombia? What is in that word? Well, I mean, it's a direct reference to Christopher Columbus. But in referring to their country as Colombia, they are, first of all, asserting some kind of difference between themselves and the old world.

This is the new world, the world that Columbus discovered. And they're also, you know, kind of hinting toward a kind of solidarity with the other parts of the new world. This is the new world, the world that Columbus discovered. And they're also, you know, kind of hinting toward a kind of solidarity with the other parts of the new world. If you look at the anthems that are most sung about the United States in the 19th century, Columbia, that's one, that's what it's called. Hail, Columbia, that is a different anthem. And Columbia, gem of the ocean. You can just see a lot of enthusiasm for this way of thinking about the So by the late 1800s, fast-forwarding a bit, where is America in terms of the story that it's telling itself about itself at that point? Well, a lot of the claims to national greatness by then have to do with the expansionary quality of the United States. Between its founding and the middle of the 19th century,

the United States has claimed an enormous amount of land. We usually call that process westward expansion or manifest destiny. But, you know, it's useful to remember that, you know, at the beginning, the United States did not stretch from sea to shining sea. It stretched from sea to the Mississippi. And so a big part of the country's identity is this process of really rapid expansion and also a really staggering population growth of the white population within the United States, and not just growth in terms of numbers, but spread. At the beginning of the founding of the United States, the land that will become the United States has about three or four million people in it, at a time when France has 30 million. So it's about a tenth the size of France,

give or take. By the end of the 19th century, France has grown from 30 million to 40 million, so it's significantly larger. But the United States has grown to about 76 million, so it's nearly twice the size of France. I mean, that is just an absolutely stunning population growth. This is a land that is reproducing at just an enormous pace, and that has a lot to do with a sense of the special destiny of the United States. But by the end of the 19th century, when the U.S. is emerging as this world power, something changes, right? Yeah. So it's interesting. By this time, there's still a kind of evasion about referring to the United States of America in shorthand as just America. And people tend to go for the Republic, the Union, the United States. Sometimes if you're writing it, it might just be the U period states. Things change at the end of the 19th century, and it's not the way you might think it would be.

It's not a just sort of gradual shift. As far as I can tell, there's actually a pretty abrupt shift. So in 1898, the United States enters a war that Spain is already fighting with its colonies. There's a series of colonial revolts that are taking place within the Spanish Empire. The United States enters this ostensibly to assist Spain's rebelling subjects, but in doing so, supplies a decisive burst of force that ends the conflict that had been going on for quite some time, ends it with Spain defeated. And then the United States, to the surprise of many of Spain's colonized subjects who interpreted the United States to

be an ally, then it takes over a number of Spain's colonial possessions. So very quickly, the United States seizes Puerto Rico, Guam, and the very populous Philippines. And then at the same time, in a sort of burst of imperial enthusiasm, it also takes the non-Spanish lands of Hawaii and American Samoa. So very quickly, the United States has a really serious and populous overseas empire. And it just becomes clear to everyone who's paying attention that the borders of the United States have just changed dramatically in a very short amount of time and that that might have some serious implications for the identity of the United States.

Once the Philippines is part of the United States, once Puerto Rico is part of the country, then people start to have very different thoughts. And they start to think, is this really a union of states? Because suddenly the name no longer works in any way. It's not a union, because this was certainly not consensual. It is not a collection of states, because places like the Philippines are quite clearly colonies and it's not at all clear that they're going to be states and it also isn't entirely

restricted to the Americas either. How international wars of expansion call into question the very ideals of the United States when we come back. Hi, this is Kayla from San Rafael, California. I'm at work, but you're listening to ThruLive. freedom. And the contradictions of these seemingly colonial wars caused many U.S. citizens to question what the country even stood for. But the reality is, the wars of expansion had been building for a century and had many supporters. Some people are quite proud of that. People like Teddy Roosevelt, an ardent imperialist, are quite eager to revise how they see the United States.

If you think about what it is if you're a young man in the 1890s, you know, let's say you're in your 30s, you were just born or very young while the Civil War was happening. The Civil War was your dad's generation. And so there's a very martial culture in the United States. By the 1890s, the opportunities to prove oneself on the battlefield, like your dad did, those seem to be vanishing. And there's, you know, part of what seems to be in the air is men like Teddy Roosevelt, who want to be hard. And who have a real commitment and investment in a certain kind of violent masculinity and are eager for opportunities for that.

So there's a lot of jingoism or war fever that has to do with people who want to have an opportunity for the United States to, you know, have more warfare. You know, at the same time as that's all happening, there's this theory in the air that grows quite popular that the democracy in the United States has been sustained by the presence of a frontier. And in 1890, the Census Bureau says, actually, the United States technically doesn't really have any more settlement frontier. Its borders aren't growing.

And so whatever historical experience has characterized the United States to this day is over. And we're imagining a different kind of the United States. There's a solution. Make more frontier. Seize more territory. So here's something kind of amazing. If you look at all public speech of sitting presidents from George Washington up until McKinley, who was the president during the war with Spain. It is really hard to find a president who refers to their country as America. I mean, sometimes you can find it. It's not that it never happens, but it really surprisingly rarely happens.

So I counted it all up and I found 11 instances where presidents unambiguously refer to their country as America. And that's, you know, that's about one per decade. That's really rare. And it's because they're usually saying the United States, the Republic, or the Union, or something like that. Teddy Roosevelt takes over and immediately, you know, his first message to Congress, he refers to it as America. And he's gone. Like, I found a two-week period where he uses the word America to refer to the country, just in that two-week period, more than every past president combined had. And once Roosevelt takes office and kind of rebrands the country in this way, he's not the only one doing it, then you just see, you know, that's it. You know, now it's entirely normal to refer to the United States as America.

And I think part of the thought here, and we have contemporary evidence that this is the case, is that people like Roosevelt don't find as much sense and comfort in the United States as their predecessors did because they're actually aware that the political character of the United States is changing and that it might make sense to have a different kind of way to refer to it that doesn't involve describing it as a union of states because they're forthrightly imagining their country to be an empire.

How does this happen? How do you think it leaks into the language and culture? Is it just like a million small decisions people make that add up to this cultural change? Yeah, sure. And we've seen semantic shifts happen. I mean, you know, one of the amazing things the Internet does is accelerates these. So you see them happen really quickly. New ways of referring to, especially identities, right?

That's one of the things that is the most malleable and the most dynamic in terms of how we refer to ourselves. What words we use, what words we don't use, what words sound quaint to our ears that we aggressively reject. So you're familiar with people coming up with new ways to refer to themselves in the places they inhabit because those words are really important and people use them a lot. And so when they start feeling like those words don't quite fit, they find new ones. One thing that happens is they use America more, and America seems to just suit a little better. But they also start reaching for phrases like greater America, the greater republic, imperial America, or the Greater United States.

These are all ways of solving that problem that go a little differently than America. In this moment when the United States self-consciously becomes an empire, I mean, it had already been claiming lands for quite some time, but nevertheless, this is a moment when a lot of people and powerful people in the United States are saying, this country isn't a republic. This country is an empire. And that's an okay thing.

Or some of them are saying that's a horrible thing and we need to reclaim our former status as a republic. But nevertheless, it's an argument that's happening out loud. out? I'm wondering what you think the significance is, why it matters how, you know, we choose to refer to ourselves as a nation. Well, I think that that semantic shift is partly made by people who accept the notion that the United States will be an empire and who are just willing to, in speech, accommodate that. It's not just a sort of occasion where the speech reflects events, but the speech also facilitates or enables events. I grew up as Dan and now suddenly I go to college and I want to be Daniel. That suggests that there's some kind of new substance underneath it. And partly that has to do with the United States' weird commitment

to seeing itself as a republic and a force for liberty at the same time as already in the 19th century it had a history of conquering lands and filling them, you know, often with great violence with white settlers and dragging enslaved blacks along behind them. At the end of the 19th century, that act of really just forthrightly taking far distant and populous colonies, that seems to be a new step in the eyes of a lot of people and a kind of moment to either admit the thing that the United States has always been, as people like Teddy Roosevelt see it. They're like, you know, the United States never really was a republic if you look at its relations

with Indians. So, you know, we should just say that out loud. Or it seems to others like a transition, possibly a deformation, possibly a maturation, like growing up. Okay, the United States is now, like Britain, like France, has overseas colonies. It's joined the adults table. And this Ramtin Arablui. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randall Nifatah. I'm Ramtin Adablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and Jamie York.

Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Lou Olkowski. Nigeri Eaton. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Volkl. Thanks also to Anya Grunman and Austin Horn. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani.

Nothing for free! Special thanks to Greg Dixon, Daniel Wood, and Michael Cieplinski for their voiceover work. Also, we'd love to hear from you. You can leave us a voicemail saying your name, where you're from, and the sentence you're listening to ThruLine from NPR by calling 872-588-8805. You might just hear yourself on our show.

That number again is 872-588-8805. Thanks for listening. Thank you. Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.