The Not-Quite States of America Read online

  It’s amusing to imagine him, or any other Founding Father, wandering the present-day streets of the U.S. Virgin Islands (or, if you’re a local, “the USVI” or, most frequently, just “the VI”). The Danish colonial architecture would feel familiar enough, and I do enjoy picturing Benjamin Franklin’s reaction to the iShip. But I suspect they’d all be taken aback by the fact that these islands are now part of the United States but not actual states, and not on any path to statehood—a setup that, politically, would surely strike them as very much like a colony. A loaded word, one intentionally erased from the aspiring nation’s name; as Bill Bryson notes in Made in America, at the time of the Revolution, “even the boldest patriot” referred to “the United Colonies” rather than “the United States,” until Thomas Paine coined the latter term, and here we are.

  Hamilton & Co. debated national expansion fervently as they planned for their new nation. Hamilton, for his part, didn’t think a “free republic” could or should be “maintained in a large geographical area,” but did hope that the United States would push westward to the strategic port of New Orleans. This, he told George Washington, “may be regarded . . . as essential to the unity of the Empire.” Thomas Jefferson opposed expansion, using the slippery-slope argument to suggest that, if this became the trend, the United States “might receive England, Holland, Ireland, etc. into it.”

  The new nation’s leaders drafted a colonial policy, the Northwest Ordinance, in 1787, a year before they ratified the Constitution. The ordinance was originally intended to address the Northwest Territory (what we now know as Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota) but came to serve as the precedent for further national expansion. New acquisitions would go through a three-stage process to become states. Step One: Congress appoints a governor, a secretary, and three-judge court. Step Two: Once a territory has “five thousand free male inhabitants of full age,” it sets up a local legislature. Step Three: The territory writes up a local constitution and, Congratulations, you’re now a state! Alternatively, if a territory reaches sixty thousand free inhabitants (slaves, alas, don’t count), it can be admitted before drafting a constitution. Thirty-three of today’s fifty states were previously territories.

  The Constitution, too, considered the territories, although only briefly and in terms that, like everything else in that august document, are open to perpetual interpretation and argument. There are two relevant parts, both in Article IV, Section 3. The first says, “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.” The second, known as the Territorial Clause, decrees that “Congress shall have the Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory* and other Property belonging to the United States.” In other words—and this is still true today—Congress has ultimate and full authority over the territories; states’ rights, that fiercely protected hallmark of our democracy, far surpass territories’ rights. Where, precisely, congressional authority begins and ends is a question that has kept the courts busy ever since.

  The nation pushed ever westward—often, of course, at the expense of American Indians and other claimants to land, about whom much has been written elsewhere—and more than doubled with the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803. The sale was authorized by none other than longtime expansion-skeptic Thomas Jefferson, with encouragement from Alexander Hamilton in defiance of his Federalist Party compatriots. (Hamilton rival Aaron Burr, for his part, hoped the Louisiana territory would secede from the Union—and that he would be its leader.) Guided by the Northwest Ordinance, the new territories followed a gradual but straightforward process to statehood: Louisiana in 1812, Mississippi in 1817, Arkansas in 1836.

  This was how the nation grew, at each step gaining more confidence and ambition, and feeling more emboldened to challenge the more established global powers. European nations had long dominated the Americas: France, Great Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, and, most of all, Spain. But Spain’s holdings dwindled as independence movements swept through Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, and Chile in the 1810s and 1820s. The United States sensed an opportunity to assert its own power in the region, and in 1823, President James Monroe issued a command to Europe: Back off. The Monroe Doctrine was a geopolitical restraining order of sorts: We’ll stay out of your Continental affairs, and you’d better not mess around in our hemisphere, claiming new colonies or stirring things up.

  Expansion was a constant presidential campaign issue. James Polk was elected in 1844 after promising to annex Texas, which he did, antagonizing Mexico; the ensuing war netted the United States much of what we now know as the Southwest, plus all of California. To the north, Polk worked out the Oregon Treaty of 1846, adding what’s now the Pacific Northwest.

  What’s often lost in the “Go west, young man” mythology of the nation is the fact that California and Oregon were not only desirable on their own terms but as stepping-stones for controlling the Pacific, just as Britain had long dominated the Atlantic. San Francisco was a superlative port; the rest of California was a nice bonus. In 1846, then-Senator William Seward decreed that “our population is destined to roll its resistless waves to the icy barriers of the north, and to encounter oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific.”

  Expansion was never simply about having more people in more places—as Polk and Hamilton and Jefferson all understood, it was about claiming areas of strategic utility. It was about enhancing the nation’s power in the world. Or, in some cases, it was about domestic strategy: in 1854, President Franklin Pierce, who had already given serious thought to acquiring Alaska, Hawaii, and Nicaragua, worked up plans for purchasing Cuba or “wresting it from Spain,” for the purpose of adding another slave-owning state to the South.

  At the root of this drive was a belief that, in the instantly famous words of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1845, it was “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Expansion was a mission from God.

  WITH THE VIEW and the Danes to keep me company, I was tempted to sit on Ronnie’s porch all day. But I’d come here to see America. Precisely what I wanted to see, and how I planned to see it, I wasn’t quite sure.

  Enter Monica, with a loose white blouse, bronze skin, and her jet-black hair pulled into a tight bun. She was born and raised in Saint Thomas, lived there until she was about thirty, then fell in love with a Dane and moved to Denmark. She was going to take the three Danes on a tour of her old stomping grounds. Would I like to join them?

  I nodded eagerly. The Danes looked disappointed.

  Ten minutes later, the five of us were wedged into Monica’s gray sedan and headed up a narrow, meandering roller-coaster road that veered through the jungle and across the island’s plump hills, which top out at more than a thousand feet. As we slowed for one tight switchback, Monica said, “I used to come up here when I was learning to drive and my boyfriend was trying to quit smoking. This curve tested us both.” When the trees thinned for a moment, we could see squiggly coastlines and small valleys, where a million shades of green were offset by scattered bursts of floral blooms, nature’s fireworks in gold and pink and fire-truck-red. Humble but well-kept cinder-block houses perched on the inclines, some with flat roofs outlined with rebar reaching for the sky, an aspirational halo of hope for a second (or third) story sometime soon.

  The trees tapered off and the road straightened out. We turned down a dirt road with a colorful hand-painted sign reading BORDEAUX FARMER’S MARKETPLACE. A wide path lined with wooden market stalls curved around a corner toward a pavilion the size of a small airplane hangar. The air was thick and humid after a brief sun shower, and the whirr of a weed-whacker signaled that just out sight someone was hard at work.

  We followed Monica to the pavilion, where several men were chatting. Monica greeted them all warmly. “Good morning, good morning!” to the preppy white guy who was dropping off some solar panels, �
�Good morning, good morning!” to the black Rasta in dreadlocks (including his beard) and tall white rubber boots. It’s standard practice in the USVI to greet everyone you see, friend or stranger, in restaurants, on buses, walking down the street. As one man would tell me, “You can call someone a mutha, say anything you want, but the worst insult is not saying ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good afternoon . . . How you doing?’”

  The marketplace stalls were painted with green, gold, and red stripes and symbols familiar to anyone who has wandered into the Bob Marley section of a poster shop: regal lions, black stars, slogans like HAIL D KING RASTAFARI LIVE. This, I realized, was what I’d seen on the retaining-wall murals the night before: Rastafari iconography, the real-deal kind.

  The pavilion overlooked terraced hillsides, and Monica led us down a muddy path, exchanging pleasantries and gossip with everyone she passed. I got into the spirit, offering my own chipper greetings. The Danes gave me sideways glances.

  On one of the terraces, a tall, burly man was clearing the field with a weed-whacker; he looked up and switched it off as Monica approached, giving her a familiar wave. His name was Elridge Thomas and he seemed to be in charge here. “We started as an agricultural group and evolved into a Rasta group,” he said. They were preparing for their annual two-day festival, where farmers sold their goods—everything vegan and wholesome, a sort of Whole Foods of the islands—followed by concerts in the evenings.

  The festival was a showcase of the specialty produce they grew on the farm, including some things I’d never heard of: eggfruit, breadfruit, and guavaberry, which Elridge said was not the same as a guava. He pointed out a type of mango called Guinness and multiple varieties of avocados (“pears” in the local parlance).

  In my mind, I was slicing them open and taking messy bites. A sun shower began spritzing us, but I was in no hurry to take shelter and end the conversation—perhaps he’d offer us a sample if we stayed just a bit longer. I could see the Danes eying the pavilion.

  “What kind of music do you play at the concerts?” I asked Elridge.

  “Reggae, of course!” he said, and I caught the Danes snickering as I blushed.

  I decided to change the subject. “Do you have many young people out here working the land?”

  “Well . . .” Elridge began. His shoulders slumped a bit as he answered. No. They didn’t have much interest from the younger generation. It’s hard work, the kind that doesn’t always pay off, even when you put in your best effort, he said. He pointed to an avocado tree that had been stubbornly refusing to yield fruit for more than twenty years. “She had all that time to prove herself,” he said, “but we’ll give her one more summer. We’ll give her that.

  “Local agriculture is in danger,” he continued, lamenting Virgin Islanders’ overreliance on imported goods and a general lack of support from the local and federal government. “The politicians just give money to people who already have it. They don’t care about agriculture,” he said, adding that it was only 1 percent of the USVI’s overall budget.† Tourism gets all the attention, all the funding—all those ships in Charlotte Amalie, all those beachfront resorts. “But I keep telling them you have to invest in the people who live here, who will stay here.”

  Elridge sighed slightly, his muscular shoulders rolling. Then he fired up his weed-whacker and got back to work.

  Up in the marketplace, another friend of Monica’s was starting to set up shop, a tall woman named Menen, with a wavy mane of hair and a friendly but exhausted bearing. She smiled shyly as Monica made introductions. Menen made tinctures and other therapeutic items with traditional island herbs and inspiration from recipes she found online. Today, she was selling moringa vinegar, infused with the leaves of the local “tree of life,” along with lemongrass hand cream and a sorrel wine, which she poured into little plastic cups for us to sample. It was fuchsia-colored, with a deep, sweet berry flavor (though sorrel is actually a flower, Menen said).

  “Damn, that’s good!” I sputtered, as Menen beamed and the Danes stared, clearly thinking, What a lush. No matter. I was enjoying myself.

  THE IRONY of the lack of agriculture on Saint Thomas—aside from the fact that, as a quick glance at the landscape reveals, the whole place is immensely fertile, if hilly—is that one of the key moments in American overseas expansion started with a need to help struggling farmers.

  In the early 1800s, back in the states, key crops like cotton and tobacco were in danger of catastrophic failure due to depleted soil: no nutrients, no sustenance, no growth. American farmland, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “does not want a prayer, it wants manure.” Across the Atlantic, the same problem was so pronounced that in the 1840s, according to historian Jimmy Skaggs, some European farmers “raided the Napoleonic battlefields . . . for bones to spread over their fields.”

  The United States had its eye on an equally unlikely source: remote, barren islands. It’s here where the story of American expansion overseas and beyond the bounds of hemispheres truly begins, on these specks in the sea that we desperately wanted for their . . . cue the trumpet fanfare . . . bird poop. With its high nitrogen content, guano is an exceptional fertilizer,‡ and bird by bird, over the course of millennia, it built up until it was fifty meters deep on some islands. In 1856, the U.S. Congress passed the Guano Islands Act, which says:

  Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other Government . . . such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States.

  In other words: We know these unclaimed islands are covered in bird poop. So, dibs, that’s all ours! Within eight years, the USA had claimed fifty-nine islands and outcroppings in the Caribbean and the Pacific, as Skaggs details in his book The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion.

  Guano-mining operations didn’t just mean a couple of ships filled with roughnecks wielding pickaxes, but large-scale operations that operated for decades, with quarries and railroads and small towns. On two-square-mile Navassa, about thirty-five miles west of Haiti, mining spanned forty years, and extracted nearly a million tons of guano. It was grueling work, days filled with swinging pickaxes, the air a haze, the equatorial sun on furnace-blast. There were almost one hundred fifty miners on Navassa at a time, most of them recently freed black men, with notoriously harsh white overseers. In September 1889, some of the workers rioted, killing five white overseers and making headlines across the USA. Three men were given the death sentence, which was commuted by President Benjamin Harrison, after much lobbying by Baltimore’s African-American community and others who pointed out the inhumane conditions.

  This is one of the more remarkable tales from the Guano Islands, but—as you can imagine from the work and the setting—far from the only intrigue on these distant specks. Navassa is just one of these now-abandoned islands with ghost towns and empty barracks and the ruins of railroads; some even have airstrips. If you’re a James Bond movie villain looking to set up shop, here is your real estate.

  Guano mining on Navassa ended in 1898, but the United States still holds on to it even though Haiti still claims it, citing the 1697 Treaty of Rijswijk and the fact that they’re just thirty-five miles away.

  So why not let Haiti have it? For that matter, what about Bajo Nuevo Bank and Serranilla Bank, two sets of islets and reefs some three hundred miles southwest of Navassa? They consist of little more than shipwrecks and strips of sand. Jamaica, Nicaragua, and Colombia all claim them; the Colombian Navy patrols the waters. Why does the United States care about these places at all?

  Because when you claim one bit of land, you get its surrounding waters, twelve miles in every direction. You get the shipping lanes, the fishing rights, whatever minerals are under the sea. And you get the opportunity to just be in the area, to keep an eye on the neighbors, always a nice perk.

  You find your scraps and hold on to them, no matter how small t
hey may seem. Bit by bit, your dominion expands. As Hamilton said of New Orleans, and Jefferson and Pierce and Polk and Seward and many others also knew, these are the seeds of empire.

  In 1864, it appeared that the United States was going to plant its flag on even larger, more consequential outposts. William Seward, now President Lincoln’s Secretary of State in a nation at war, turned his attention from the Pacific to the Danish West Indies. Seward was an expansion advocate of long standing, but these islands were of particular interest, as the Union sought to combat Confederate ships that were operating in nearby waters. The islands were prime real estate, right where the Caribbean meets the Atlantic, and the harbor in Charlotte Amalie, formed from the caldera of a long-blown volcano, was the region’s best spot for a naval base.

  It took a few years to work out the details, and in 1867 the sale documents were drawn up. The price: $7.5 million. But Congress started having second thoughts. The war was over but the nation was still reeling and was having buyer’s remorse after the purchase, earlier that year, of Alaska—widely known as Seward’s Folly. In 1870, the USA reneged, much to Denmark’s annoyance. King Christian was about as catty as a monarch could be, saying that “We . . . feel a satisfaction that circumstances have relieved Us from making a sacrifice [by selling the islands].”

  The Danish West Indies stayed on the United States’ wish list, and in 1896 the Republicans put annexation of the islands in their party platform. Expansion fervor was in full swing, and the Republicans’ presidential candidate that year, William McKinley, won the election in part based on a promise to annex Hawaii, which he did in 1898. The United States tried to buy the Danish West Indies again in 1902, only to have the Danish Parliament reject the deal by one vote. In 1915, the United States gave it one more shot. The islands were more strategically desirable than ever, as a key transit point for ships going through the just-opened Panama Canal, which was also now American property. Plus, World War I had begun, and there were murmurs that Germany would take over Denmark and therefore the Danish West Indies. In Charlotte Amalie, the powerful Hamburg-American Line was rumored to be buying up more buildings. The company’s owner also happened to be the German consul. The New York Times reported, “If the proposed sale should be rejected . . . an occupation of St. Thomas was thoroughly expected to be a consequence.” This time, the deal went through. A new treaty was drafted, then signed by both nations on August 16, 1916. The cost had risen to $25 million (equal to about $460 million today, and the highest per-acre amount the United States has ever paid for land).