The Not-Quite States of America Read online

  But once I started finding information, the intrigue made it worth the wait.

  One day, I typed “Guam” into Google. That’s all—Guam. I had intended to get a quick overview of its history, but I got distracted by the present, in the form of the Google News headlines, of which there were three:

  GUAM LURING RUSSIAN TOURIST DOLLARS

  THANKS TO VISA WAIVER

  From the Moscow Times.

  US PLANS FOR GUAM MISSILE BASE SEEN

  AS COUNTERING STRENGTH OF CHINA

  From the South China Morning Post.

  DEAD MICE UPDATE:

  TINY ASSASSINS DROPPED ON GUAM AGAIN

  From National Public Radio. The dead mice had been stuffed full of acetaminophen—Tylenol—and dropped from helicopters into the jungle as poison to control the brown tree snake population. Again. Evidently it had worked previously. (How many snakes were there?)

  So here you had an island that was at once overflowing with tourists from around the world, infested with jungle snakes with a taste for over-the-counter painkillers, and also served as the front line for keeping the world’s rising superpower in check. And that was just the news from a random Tuesday.

  Clearly, this was a place worth getting to know more.

  The history, along with that of the other territories, turned out to be even more fascinating, with mixed-up histories of conquest and corrupt governors who sounded like Victorian-era literature villains come to life, all pith helmets and extravagant mustaches and diabolical plots. In various territories, there were pirates and bloody fights for independence and hippie dropouts and eccentric millionaires who lived in castles.

  It also seemed that, right around the turn of the twentieth century, the territories were part of the national mythology and the everyday conversation. “I have recently been traveling over a large part of the United States,” wrote Benjamin Kidd in the Atlantic, in December 1898. “On this subject of [overseas] expansion I talked with the people generally. It was impossible to avoid.” It was one of the focal points of the 1900 presidential election, between Republican William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

  A century or so ago, Americans didn’t just know about the territories but cared about them, argued about them. But what changed? How and why did they disappear from the national conversation? Was there a compelling reason why they mattered for the present-day USA, or were they just remnants of a long-past historical moment?

  As I kept reading, I became more baffled—and obsessed.

  And more than once I also thought, Well, that’s messed up.

  For instance, there was the fact that residents of the territories cannot vote for president, because they’re shut out of the Electoral College. Americans who live in any other nation on earth can vote absentee back in the states; even American astronauts in the International Space Station can vote for president. But Americans whose official address is in the territories—American soil—cannot, a fact that would seem to be at odds with the very ideals of our democracy.

  They can, however, run for president—John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone back when it was part of the USA. (In other words, in the 2008 election, there was a candidate who was not born in the states—but, contrary to the swirling conspiracy theories, it wasn’t Barack Obama.) They can also vote in the presidential primaries and be delegates at the political parties’ national conventions. The governor of Puerto Rico spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2012, followed a few minutes later by a family band from American Samoa.

  There was also a major asterisk when it came to congressional representation. Like the states, territories elect representatives to serve them in Washington, D.C. They have offices on the Hill, participate in committee discussions, do many of the things other congresspeople do. Except that they don’t—can’t—vote on any bills, which is to say they can’t do the most important thing that congresspeople do. (Washington, D.C., gets three electoral votes but has a similar congressional setup.)

  There was layer upon topsy-turvy layer of weirdness in the history, in the politics, in the present-day life. I’m a sucker for far-flung quirk, and here, it seemed, I’d hit the jackpot.

  It’s a big, wonderful, crazy place, this country of ours, and I love it. I love it precisely because it’s such a diverse, enigmatic, ever-evolving patchwork, one you could spend a lifetime trying to understand. And the only way to do that, really, is to get out there and see it.

  ON HIS DEATHBED, in 1936, King George V of Great Britain asked, “How is the empire?” His domain, of course, spanned truly across the globe—India, Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Bermuda, the list goes on, the sun never set. Our modern American outposts are not nearly as numerous or as populated as our onetime rulers were in their heyday,* but it’s still curious that our holdings have no cohesive, collective reputation. If any of our leaders asked, “How is the empire?” the most likely public response would be, “We don’t have an empire.”

  Yet today, with a population of nearly four million people, the U.S. territories are more than ten times larger than the present-day colonial outposts of the British Empire. They’re larger, in fact, than the remaining colonies of all the old-fashioned imperial dominions—Britain, Spain, France, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and so on—combined.

  I wanted to answer King George’s question for my own nation. I wanted to meet the people, eat the food, sniff the air, experience everyday life in all its joy and tragedy and poetry and banality. So I packed my bag with sunscreen and, as a talisman, a red-white-and-blue-checkered shirt. And I set off on a journey that would lead me from traditional villages to modern metropolises to lost-world jungles, more than thirty-one thousand miles, crossing the equator and the International Date Line but never changing currency or getting a visa. An altogether different sort of all-American Road Trip.

  * The sun does set on the American empire, by the way. Connect the farthest-west point, Guam, with the farthest-east point, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and you’ve gone less than halfway around the world. Time-zone-wise, they’re fourteen hours apart. So in June, the sun never sets on the American Empire; in December, it does, every day.

  A VERY BRIEF NOTE ON

  THE TERRITORIES AND

  THEIR VARIOUS DESIGNATIONS

  BEFORE HITTING THE ROAD, LET’S ESTABLISH SOME of the key terms used to categorize the territories:

  1. All territories are either organized or unorganized, which has to do with whether or not they’ve passed an Organic Act, which is essentially a territorial constitution.

  2. The territories are also either incorporated or unincorporated, which describes whether or not a place is considered fully part of (incorporated with) the United States and all of its federal laws. Unincorporated means that some, but not all, of the U.S. Constitution applies, that Congress has ultimate oversight and veto power over everything, and that the place is neither on equal terms with the states nor officially on the path to statehood. All inhabited territories are unincorporated.

  Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands are organized unincorporated territories.

  Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands are officially commonwealths, not territories at all—theoretically, commonwealths have a bit more local autonomy, though there’s much debate about the real-world distinction between the two designations. For all practical purposes, commonwealths are just another form of organized unincorporated territories (and so, for the most part, I’m using “territories” as a catch-all term, including the commonwealths).

  American Samoa and most Minor Outlying Islands are unorganized, unincorporated territories.

  Then there’s Palmyra Atoll, which is a thousand miles south of Hawaii, and is unorganized but incorporated. From a legal standpoint, this five-square-mile atoll with no permanent population has more constitutional rights than any inhabited territory. If that seems a bit unexpected, well, we’re just getting started.

  THE NOT-QUITE STATES

  OF AMERICA


  Chapter 1

  THE

  EMPIRE’S NEW

  CLOTHES

  The Virgin Islands

  of the United States

  BY THE TIME I GOT TO THE RUM BAR IN THE RAIN forest, the beer-drinking pigs were already sloshed. The bartender had cut them off. I was crushed, deprived of that obscure but potent strain of the American Dream: If you work hard, someday you will be able to buy cans of beer at a jungle bar and give them to pigs in a pen out back. They will grasp the cans in their capacious mouths, bite them open, chug the contents, and spit out the crushed aluminum with rapturous grins, while you think, This is a magnificent country.

  The bar, a palm-roofed, open-sided hut called the Montpellier Domino Club, was up a lonely, hilly road tunneled by trees and cratered with potholes; it was about four miles inland from the town of Frederiksted, on the west side of Saint Croix, the largest of the four U.S. Virgin Islands.

  The pigs were large, state-fair-sized, and had a loutish charm as they lunged for the cans, front legs up on the edge of their pens, keening. Their thirst is so prodigious that some years ago they switched over to nonalcoholic beer on doctor’s orders, after too many piglets were born with fetal alcohol syndrome. Yet the corpulent porkers sometimes overdo it even on O’Doul’s, all that cheered-on chugging tiring them out. Like today, when a cruise ship was in port in Frederiksted and the tourist vans kept coming and coming.

  “They’re done—we’ve had enough excitement for the day,” the bar’s owner, Norma, a stout Trinidadian of middle years, told me when I arrived around four p.m.

  I settled onto a stool at the bar, a small three-sided affair with a worn wood countertop, and dried palm fronds beckoned lazily from the ceiling. On the far wall behind the bar, a shelf held more types of rum than I knew existed, most of them Cruzan, the island’s pride. There was seating for perhaps fifteen around the bar, but right now there were just three other patrons, who had all moved down from the mainland USA decades ago. There was Leon, wearing a coral polo shirt and rimless glasses, and who I took to be a retired business executive; Ray, whose calculator watch and unkempt hair telegraphed science teacher; and Linda, a woman I couldn’t quite read aside from noting her intense gaze and the incongruity of the chartreuse bike helmet she was wearing while sitting at the bar.

  They were clearly regulars, their conversation suffused with a jocular familiarity that can only be earned through many hours and many drinks together.

  Leon: “I should leave soon to get to Home Depot and repot my orchids before it gets dark.”

  Ray: “When’s your orchid show in Florida?”

  Leon: “Next month. You should tag along. There’ll be plenty of ladies there.”

  The topics caromed unhurriedly: the state of local property values, the surprisingly high quality of the bar’s johnny cakes (a fried flatbread, dense and delicious), and the need—oft-stated but never acted upon—to head home for the day. The three bartenders chimed in as conversational equals; there were two young women and Norma, who held court with an easygoing charisma from a folding chair in the center of the bar area.

  All in all, it was the sort of take-a-load-off-you’re-with-friends atmosphere you’d find at any corner dive bar in the states. As if to prove the workaday nature of the place, and defying all jungle-rum-bar logic, Ray and Linda were drinking cans of Old Milwaukee. In foam cozies. Which they’d brought from home.

  Of course, I thought. That makes sense.

  And the thing is, I meant it. Everything about this place had a certain offbeat logic, in keeping with the rhythms of life here. I’d been in the U.S. Virgin Islands for more than a week now and had come to expect these sorts of pairings, to smile and nod and appreciate the multiverse of possibilities.

  WHEN I FIRST arrived in Charlotte Amalie, Saint Thomas—the territory’s capital and commercial center, with 18,500 residents—my disorientation was so profound that I could feel my gray matter pulsing. All those mixed messages, from my phone to the street names to the American cars driving British-style, on the left. I took it all in, wide-eyed, enchanted.

  I was staying at a guesthouse called the Crystal Palace, a cardinal-red Spanish Colonial manor midway up one of Charlotte Amalie’s three hills. It was the longtime family home of the proprietor, Ronnie Lockhart, a fifth-generation Saint Thomian; his grandfather, he said, had designed the territorial flag. The house had a distinct feel of fading grandeur, particularly the third-floor living room, with its oil paintings of sailing ships and a rack of Panama hats that looked like they hadn’t been touched for decades. The living room was open to a tiled porch, where I lingered the first morning, eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, the town and the harbor laid out before me.

  The waterfront was just three blocks away and seemed so close that I could reach out and touch it—nudge the crowds of tourists walking along its edge, pick up the massive yachts at anchor, including the white and gleaming and wedge-like iShip, designed by (and for) Steve Jobs. The low-angled sunlight pumped up the already-saturated colors: the red-tile rooftops, the lush green hills, the azure acreage of placid sea. I texted photos to Maren as fast as I could take them, while Ronnie watched, entertained by my awe.

  At the mouth of the harbor bulged smallish Hassel Island, and the larger, two-square-mile Water Island, population 182. The latter is the runt of the four official U.S. Virgin Islands, which also include Saint Thomas, population fifty-one thousand and the governmental and commercial center; Saint John, three miles east, with about four thousand people and the National Park of the Virgin Islands; and Saint Croix, forty miles south, home to roughly fifty thousand residents and twice the land area of Saint Thomas. Along with the British Virgin Islands, just a few miles north and east of Saint John, these are the northwestern points of the Lesser Antilles, the chain of hilly, inkblot landmasses curving along the eastern edge of the Caribbean.

  Between the Crystal Palace and the harbor was a grid of narrow lanes and low-slung historic buildings outlined in white trim. To either side, more of the same, and, on some of the more vertiginous inclines, steps replaced streets on the most direct route up the hill. The city beckoned: Come on down, Doug! You can wander for hours! Meander for days! Explore for—

  “You won’t be goin’ anywhere except where I tell you,” Ronnie said. “Go another way and they’re probably gonna take your wallet and maybe shoot you.” He pointed out the one acceptable route for the short walk to the harbor as he leaned over the edge of the porch, his gaze narrowing. I sighed heavily, recalling the crime warnings I’d read before my trip. I’d tried hard not to get too anxious about them, particularly since, inevitably, one of the key anecdotes dated to before I was born, the 1972 mass shooting at the Fountain Valley Golf Course on Saint Croix, which targeted tourists and left eight people dead. Even now, I knew, the USVI had one of the highest murder rates on the planet. But I’d been clinging to tourist denial, in the thrall of the tropical landscape and centuries-old streetscape.

  “Last year, they killed somebody during Night Out Against Crime in Frenchtown,” Ronnie said, meeting my alarmed gaze. Satisfied that I understood his point, he looked back down at the town.

  “And that is a real problem,” he growled. I looked down, expecting to see some menacing figure, but he was gesturing to the rooftops of Main Street, a block inland from the waterfront and lined with duty-free shops in historic buildings. Above the red tile danced a green inflatable arm-waver, that kitschy icon of car-sales lots.

  “They wouldn’t have that at Colonial Williamsburg, and they shouldn’t have it here!” Ronnie said. He stared hard at the arm-waver, clearly hoping today would be the day he mastered telekinesis.

  Two other guests ambled onto the porch, a middle-aged couple from Denmark, and then a third, also Danish. This was a funny coincidence, I said out loud, which was met with a quartet of blank stares.

  “We get a lot of Danes here,” Ronnie said, in the same tone that someone at Disney World might say, We get a lot of families.


  Before 1917, these islands were known as the Danish West Indies. This much I knew from my research. I hadn’t understood, though, that modern-day Danes come here by the planeful, including regular charter flights from Copenhagen to Charlotte Amalie, as one of my breakfast companions, Anne, now explained. They spread out across the islands to see the sites that are part of their history but no longer part of their homeland, the forts and edifices preserved and docent-staffed by a country with no claim to this specific history.

  Anne turned out to be the president of the Danish West Indies Historical Society; she was studious and chic in blue-framed glasses. The topic turned to history and I showed her the books I had in the messenger bag at my feet. I pulled them out and one by one, and she dismissed each as inferior, with a small, shy wince. Then she talked me into buying her own book for $55.

  Ronnie stood idly at the edge of the porch, chuckling at my conversation with Anne and glaring at the arm-waver. Finally, he looked up with a smirk and said, “She respects history.”

  FROM A NARROWLY focused American perspective, the most important event in the history of the Danish West Indies may have been the arrival on Saint Croix, in 1765, of a pale, redheaded boy of eight or ten years old (the record is inconclusive) named Alexander, and his subsequent coming-of-age in Christiansted, the island’s largest town. His was an inauspicious beginning: born out of wedlock on the Caribbean island of Nevis to a Scottish immigrant mother, who died three years after they arrived on Saint Croix, leaving her two sons orphaned. But young Alexander was a sharp-witted autodidact, and in 1772 he wrote a newspaper essay that so impressed local leaders that they raised funds to send him to college in the British colonies in North America. He continued to thrive and soon he was a household name: Alexander Hamilton.