Perspective: Trump neglects and demeans U.S. territories. It’s an American tradition.
By Daniel Immerwahr Daniel Immerwahr teaches history at Northwestern University and is the author of “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.” February 27 at 5:01 PM It’s been 17 months since Hurricanes Maria and Irma tore through Puerto Rico, but the wounds are still fresh. It took nearly a year for full power to be restored. Even now, blue tarp fills in for roofs, as Puerto Ricans await federal funding.
This us/them distinction, which tracks closely with race, has been central to Washington’s handling of its overseas possessions for generations. Woodrow Wilson, speaking of the territories, declared in 1913 that they stood “outside the charmed circle of our own national life.” As a Supreme Court justice put it in 1901, in a notoriously convoluted phrase, they were “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” A part of the country, yet apart from the country.
World War II in the Philippines was the bloodiest event ever to take place on U.S. soil, killing twice as many as the Civil War. And yet it plays little part in national memory. Even Richard Nixon, who served in the Pacific during the war, believed Pearl Harbor to be “the only piece of American territory that suffered directly from enemy attack in World War II.”
Rhoads’s letter was discovered before he sent it, and it became a scandal on the island. Rhoads protested that he’d been joking, and it is genuinely unclear whether he killed anyone. Nonetheless, Rhoads suffered virtually no consequences. He fled to the mainland, faced no hearings, kept his job and within a few years was elected vice president of the New York Academy of Medicine. In 1949, he made the cover of Time magazine, celebrated as a hero for his contributions to medicine.
What motivated the assassins? One, Oscar Collazo, spoke bitterly of how Rhoads had never faced trial. The shooting, he explained, was designed to draw attention to Puerto Rico’s plight. “How little the American people know of Puerto Rico!” Collazo exclaimed. “They don’t know Puerto Rico is a possession of the United States.”
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