JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 420
This map of the American Empire, “a might nation on whose flag the sun never sets”, appeared in an odd little publication called US, a Presentation of Americanism, published in 1940 by the United States Flag Association. The author, Col. James A. Moss, was adjectively gifted, or affected, never having met one he didn’t like or couldn’t use. The pamphlet drips red, white and bluey drippings–on this map spread alone we see unimaginative and repetitious uses of the words “amazing”, “marvelous”, “unprecedented” and so on.
Yet for all of this multi-colored ink and trying adjectives, the Empire, or empire, as described by Moss really wasn’t so much, once you added up all the square miles. Actually, if you take away Alaska from this mix, all of this external property doesn’t add up to more than Texas; if you subtracted the very problematic size of the Philippines, these properties wouldn’t cover North Carolina*. Now so far as “empires” go, this isn’t much–they’re lovely places to land planes, though, or refuel ships (in earlier days)–but when the foreign conquests don’t add up to 5% of the general land mass, an “Empire” it isn’t. Perhaps if one of those flags was on Australia (sorry!), well, then, that would make a stiffer claim for the E-word (or I-word, actually, as in Imperium). Roman, Persian, Ottoman, British, Assyrian, Spanish, Byzantine, Median/Mongol, Athenian, Akkadian, Russian, Celestial--these are empires (whole alphabets of them), in power, land, influence. America could’ve really have been an empire in 1945 had it the stomach and hadn’t been exhausted of the whole idea of war–thank goodness it didn’t happen. Running amok and all. I’m happy to think of this Skinny Empire of the United States in 1940–Fat Empires generally are killers.
Some of the other Skinny Posts:
Skinny III: Skinny Water. An Extremely Thin Shower Apparatus, 1888.
Skinny II: Morals, Class Warfare & Letting Someone Else Pick up your Dropped Fork
Skinny (I) Tech–Swimming, Sitting and Smoking Thin (Really Thin)
*There are simple ways of determining this exactly–adding up columns of figures in the Statesman’s Yearbook will satisfy this need, but I think that my guess gets us to the point to within a comfortable margin.
