Thanks to him, all traffic lights have the same rules, which they didn’t have before. Herbert Hoover was a major proponent of standardization. Then we learn of the dark side of Woodrow Wilson, who was a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, defending their motives as “the mere instinct of self-preservation.” When the Japanese delegation asked to insert language about racial equality into the League of Nations covenant, the proposal had the support of the majority, and the French delegation deemed the cause “indisputable.” However, Wilson blocked it, refusing to let even the principle of racial equality stand. Because of Puerto Rico, we have the birth control pill today, but that did not occur without a toll. Also blatant genocide occurred there in the form of medical testing and female sterilization. In Puerto Rico, mustard gas was tested on humans, because they too were not white, so were considered expendable. Did you know we owned that nation as a colony for 47 years, from 1898 to 1946? Consider that the worse death toll on American soil ever was the 1.7 million people who died in WWII in the Philippines we’ve never heard of it because most of them were Filipino and not white. The book offers a detailed account of our high-handed management of the Philippines. At that time, we seized 94 islands for their guano deposits, which we used for fertilizer.

US conquest began as the pioneers rolled west in their covered wagons. To quote the Puerto Rican nationalist Pedro Albizu Campos: “The Yankees are interested in the cage, but not the birds. It is a lucid indictment of our practice of extracting strategic benefit from colonies while denying rights or representation to their inhabitants.

It is a fascinating expose on US history from a global systems point of view– one that we never got in school. This 528 page book is crammed full of information, much of which blows the mind.

It was eye-opening, and even history experts would learn a lot of surprising, well researched, unknown material from it. This is a very absorbing account of the imperial nature of the US that is presented in an intriguing, approachable way.

How to hide an empire review