In Daniel Immerwahr’s intriguing volume, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019), the main contribution is not archival, but perspectival (16). It’s about point of view, about giving importance, even centrality, to readily available information that seems to be hiding in plain sight. It’s about what is not in the history books but should be. The author describes not just a hidden empire, but a new concept of empire. The President of the collapsing Dominican Republic virtually begged to be annexed into the United States in 1903. Teddy Roosevelt had a better plan. If the U.S. “seized the levers of finance and trade” it could leave sovereignty untouched, (114). That was a pattern that would be repeated. It was, in fact, the model for ending the dictatorship in Chile in 1990. If the far right (and the U.S. Embassy) controlled the money (and the press), it didn’t matter who controlled the Congress or the Presidency. The new game is all about creating the illusion of freedom and democracy. Couple that with the central criterion of covert action starting about 1960, not fairness or rationality or even practical effects, but plausible deniability, (see Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2007), and history quickly becomes indistinguishable from conspiracy theory.

After reading Immerwahr’s work, however, one might have to recognize that conspiracy is not a theory at all. It is the stuff of history, and (Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones aside, and I suspect that the British royals are not, in fact, reptiles) the label of conspiracy theorist, is part of the smokescreen, a disqualifier regularly employed as a strategy for hiding the empire. This is a story of self-deception. His recurring theme is the suppression of knowledge (see also, 40). Whether or not that is conscious, cultural or intentional, and at what levels, is another question, but Immerwahr reveals how the basic principles of the ugly American dream play out abroad. His best documented, and most frequent, point is how the bottom line for U.S. policy-making was, as often as not, white supremacy. That should make the basic premise of the current administration come as no surprise. Broadway’s adaptation of the Native American tragedy, Green Grow the Lilacs, to create a musical manifest destiny pamphlet, Oklahoma!, is a perfect example of how empire cannibalizes dissent, (45). Similarly, the author shows how West Side Story became all there was to know about Puerto Rico for most Americans, (260-261).

Judith Vary Baker published a memoir (Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald, 2010) in which she recounts not only her 1963 love affair with the man the world remembers as one more lone gunman with three names and no accomplices. More interestingly, her story is about a CIA science project involving thousands of white mice, Simian Virus 40 (accidentally discovered in the manufacture of the Salk polio vaccine), a particle accelerator and world-renowned medical researcher, Dr Alton Ochsner at Tulane University. The experiment was intended to weaponize a cancer-causing virus for potential use against foreign leaders (Fidel) who needed to die without implicating the CIA, (plausible deniability). Judith Baker’s account is typically regarded with suspicion, in spite of the fact that she was a natural historian. She saved every lunch counter receipt and bus ticket to back it up. If her account is true, then the Warren Report is not. That is not acceptable knowledge, it must be suppressed.

Alongside Immerwahr’s account of Dr. Cornelius Packard Roades (pioneer of chemotherapy and poison gas) on his “island sized laboratory” in Puerto Rico, (145), Judith Baker’s account does not seem at all far-fetched.  Laura Briggs’ hought-provoking monograph, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (2002) would seem to concur. Briggs looks at how the perceived uncontrolled sexuality of brown people on the island made it OK to use them for experiments, the same ones Immerwahr describes (247ss) regarding birth control and sterilization. Then, we have Dr. Ewan Cameron, pioneer of psychiatry, who tortured his patients and laid the groundwork for the CIA’s signature program for furthering the cause of global freedom, MKULTRA. What might have seemed like exceptions emerge as the underlying pattern. Immerwahr’s acute perception for the obvious threatens to unravel a century of ideological mythmaking. The American dream is, precisely that, a dream.

One tangential reference is in order. Immerwahr mentions putting natives on display in a human zoo at the 1899 expo in Omaha. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), protagonist Billy Pilgrim gets kidnapped by aliens, and put on display naked in a cage with his girlfriend on a faraway planet where spectators came to watch them have sex. More recently, in Darwin’s Ghosts (2018), Ariel Dorfman portrays a descendant of the men who put Patagonian Natives on display in Europe. Spoiler alert. And the chapter on Teddy Roosevelt’s Good Day mentions the work of novelist Owen Wister and historian Frederick Jackson Turner. Those works, and many more of that period, are reviewed an analyzed in Richard W. Etulain’s insightful volume, Re-imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art (1996). Etulain traces the multidisciplinary process of cultural continuity and change in three stages: the West as frontier, the West as region and the post-regional West.

Immewahr also discusses the universalization of plastics and the English Language as evidence of U.S. hidden empire. Moreover, we are left with a question about Puerto Rico. What will happen there, now?