How the US became America

In the late 1890s, the United States fought wars and backed independence movements around the world. By the time the fighting was over, the US emerged as a new global power —and with it, a new identity. This week: how the U. S. became an empire, and why it started calling itself America. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Throughline and NPR. I'm Rund Abdelfatah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago, when the country's founders penned its breakup letter with the King of England and launched a revolution founded on the principles of democracy. For years after that, the US was seen as a shining beacon of what democracy could look like, an inspiration to other colonized countries looking to shake off their shackles.

• 0:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then, in 1898, the US made the crucial decision to go to war with Spain in support of Cuban and Puerto Rican rebels fighting for independence from Spain. But that wasn't the only place the US military got involved. The next year, the US got involved in another rebellion, in another Spanish territory, this time in a nation on the other side of the world, the Philippines.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Suddenly, very confusingly, the United States takes the Philippines from Spain.

• 1:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  The US ended the war by purchasing the Philippines from Spain for $20 million. And suddenly, the US was no longer this democratic underdog, but an imperial player in its own right. Today on the show, how the US became an empire, changed its name from the United States to America, and why that matters. That story, right after a quick break.

• 2:09Speaker 00

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• 3:11Speaker 04

  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. President William McKinley.

• 3:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  In February 1899, Filipinos began a new fight for independence, this time against the United States.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  You can imagine the dashed hopes of people who'd been fighting for independence. Suddenly you have to realize they have to do it again. And they do do it again.

• 3:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Daniel Immervar.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  I wrote a book called How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.

• 3:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  He's a history professor at Northwestern University.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  And it becomes a war that just consumes so many lives.

• 4:00Speaker 05

  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.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  The United States is burning villages. US 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 discomfiting 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. What people quickly see back in the US mainland and all over the world are accounts and photographs of trenches full of Filipino corpses and Filipino nationalists who are seeking independence, getting tortured and killed.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:08Speaker 06

  Teddy Roosevelt, who of course would later become president, said this about Filipinos.

• 5:14Speaker 07

  "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."

• 5:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  In other words, democracy works in the US, not in the Philippines.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  That war drags on. It just does not end, and it drags on basically until 1913. So from 1899 to 1913...

• 6:02Speaker 02

  We think that that war kills some three quarters of a million people.

• 6:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  The US was taking control of nations across the world. It annexed Guam and Hawaii, and this brought up an identity crisis.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  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 US flag is flying in all sorts of places.

• 6:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  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.

• 6:53Speaker 06

  When Daniel Immavaro 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.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  I did not go into this having any thought that the name of the country had changed at all. I mean, I, you know, I got a doctoral degree in US 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, you know, 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

• 7:48Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  And I thought, oh, my God, that's right. Wow.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  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, 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, 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.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  The, the national anthem, Star Spangled Banner, does not refer to America at any point. Like, like you wouldn't, you might not know which country is being referred to because the name of the country, at least the name that I was familiar with, is not, is nowhere in the lyrics to this.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  America the Beautiful and God Bless America, those are all anthems that come after 1898.

• 10:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  But by the end of the 19th century, when the US is emerging as this world power, something changes, right?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  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 gradual shift. As far as I can tell, there's actually a pretty abrupt shift.

• 11:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  It all started to change with the US's decision to wage war in Cuba and the Philippines and the country's eventual takeover of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  And then at the same time, in a 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.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:23Speaker 06

  The contradictions of these seemingly colonial wars caused many US 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.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  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 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, is men like Teddy Roosevelt who, 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.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  You know, at the same time as, 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.

• 14:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that's what brings us to how, all of a sudden, presidents go from calling the country...

• 14:15Speaker 02

  The United States, the Republic, or the Union, or something like that.

• 14:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  To Teddy Roosevelt taking office and rebranding the country, America.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  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? And 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.

• 15:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's episode of America in Pursuit. And yes, duly noted, this whole series refers to the US as America. If you want to hear the whole story about how the US became America, listen to our full-length episode called Becoming America. It's actually one of the first episodes we ever made on Throughline. And make sure to join us next week when we keep exploring the geography of what constitutes the United States, not just through expansion, but by creating and closing borders. Customs officers start saying, you know, this is impossible for us to police this space if people can just walk through John Brickwood's saloon and we can't see if they're entering the US or Mexico.

• 16:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  The story of the first border wall along the US and Mexico border. Don't miss it.

• 16:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by Kiana Moradam and edited by Christina Kim with help from the Throughline production team. Music, as always, by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Naguchi, Beth Donovan, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. We're your hosts, Randa Abdel Fattah. And Ramtin Arablouei. Thank you for listening.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 16:57Speaker 03

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