How the US became America

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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 U.S. was seen as a shining beacon of what democracy could look like, an inspiration to other colonized countries looking to shake off their shackles.

“And then, in 1898, the U.S. 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 U.S. military got involved. The next year, the U.S. got involved in another rebellion, in another Spanish territory. This time, in a nation, on the other side of the world, the Philippines. Suddenly, very confusingly, the United States takes the Philippines from Spain.

The U.S. ended the war by purchasing the Philippines from Spain for $20 million.

And suddenly, the U.S. was no longer this democratic underdog, but an imperial player in its own right. Today, on the show, how the U.S. became an empire, changed its name from the United States to America, and why that matters. That story right after a quick break.

It should be the earnest wish, in paramount aim of the military administration, to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines. President William McKinley. In February, 1899, Filipinos began a new fight for independence. This time, against the United States.

You know, you just can imagine the dashed hopes of people who've been fighting for independence,

“suddenly you have to realize they have to do it again, and they do do it again.”

This is Daniel Emervar. I wrote a book called How to Hide an Empire, a History of the Greater United States. He's a history professor at Northwestern University. And it becomes a war that just consumes so many lives. 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. The United States is bringing villages. U.S. 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 discomforting resemblance to water boarding today.

Back then, it was called the water cure, where dirty water was put into insurgents, mows, or suspected insurgents mows until they couldn't take it anymore, and it becomes a scandalous war. What people quickly see back in the U.S. mainland and all over the world are accounts and photographs of, you know, trenches full of Filipino corpses and Filipino nationalists who are seeking independence, getting tortured and killed.

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. Teddy Roosevelt, who, of course, would later become president, said this about Filipinos. 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 holy 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. In other words, democracy works in the U.S., not in the Philippines.

we think that that war killed some three quarters of a million people.

“The U.S. was taking control of nations across the world. It annexed Guam and Hawaii,”

and this brought up an identity crisis. 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 contiguous collection of states because it's quite obvious that the U.S. flag is flying in all sorts of places. The sudden move towards Imperial expansion in the late 19th century, and the bloody scandal is

conflict in the Philippines, caused the United States to redefine its identity. It's placed in the world, and even to reconsider its own name. When Daniel Immovar 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. 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 U.S. 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 Gekko. 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 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, people were always saying, "No, no, no, no, the 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. 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, "Have I can't possibly be true?" And then I looked, and I thought, "Oh my God, that's right. Wow." 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 so it would be like, you know, these are familiar to us today. Yankee Doodle, hailed to the chief. My country is the battle

cry of freedom, same deal on the other side. Battle him of the Republic, stars and striped forever in the star-spangled banner. These are all 19th century or 18th century songs that people sing about the United States, not a single one of them mentions the word America in its lyrics. The national anthem, star-spangled banner, does not refer to America. At any point, 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. America, the beautiful, and God bless America, those are all anthems that come after 18 million years, but by the end of the 19th century, when the US is emerging as this like world power, something changes, right? 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,

not the way you might think it would be. It's not just sort of gradual shift. As far as I can tell,

“there's actually a pretty abrupt shift. 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. And then at the same time in a sort of burst of imperial enthusiasm, it also takes the non-spanish lands of Hawaii and American someone. So very quickly, the United States has a really serious and populace overseas empire, and it just becomes clear to everyone is 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. 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. The contradictions of these seemingly colonial

wars caused many U.S. 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. Some people are quite proud of that. People like Teddy Roosevelt and ardent imperialists 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, 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 part of what seems to be in the areas is men like Teddy Roosevelt, 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. 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 have more warfare.

You know, at the same time as that's all happening, there's this theory in the other 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 experiences characterize 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. Sees more territory.

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

The United States, the Republic, or the Union, or something like that. To Teddy Roosevelt taking

office and rebranding the country, America. You know, it was 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. 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 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. That's it for this week's episode of America in pursuit, and yes, Julie noted, this whole series

“refers to the U.S. as America. If you want to hear the whole story about how the U.S. became”

America, listen to our full-length episode called "becoming America." It's actually one of the

first episodes we ever made on through-line, and make sure to join us next week when we keep exploring

and closing borders. Customs officers start saying, you know, this is impossible for us to

“police this phase that people can just walk through John Brickwood Saloon, and we can't see if”

they're entering the U.S. or Mexico. The story of the first border wall, along the U.S. and Mexico

border, don't miss it. This episode was produced by Hiana Mogadam, an edited by Christina Kim,

“with help from the through-line production team. Music as always by Romteen and his band”

drop electric. Special thanks to Julie Kane, Irene Gucci, Beth Donovan, Casey Meiner, and Lindsay

McKenna, where your host, Rundabde Feta, and Romteen Adablui. Thank you for listening.