Donald Trump isn’t the first U.S. president to consider taking land from Denmark. What did the U.S. want last time and how did it wind up for those in the middle?
Vance visit to Greenland met with cold welcome by locals
Vice President JD Vance pushed President Donald Trump’s agenda to acquire Greenland during his visit to a U.S. military base there.
The president says that “one way or another we’re gonna get” Greenland from Denmark. The vice president tells Greenlanders they’d be better off. And the White House refuses to rule out deploying American soldiers.
President Donald Trump’s bullying tactics have caused an international stir. But his bluster isn’t unheard of in White House history, and not even just in U.S. relations with Denmark.
Over a century ago, another administration brandished the same tactics to successfully take over another piece of Denmark’s old colonial lands: the U.S. Virgin Islands, then the Danish West Indies.
Americans today barely hear anything about the Islands beyond being a restful vacation destination. The U.S. territory evokes an atmosphere that’s the near opposite of Greenland: tiny bits of tropical land near the equator with near-perfect temperatures, in contrast to Greenland, the world’s largest island that is not a continent. The Virgin Islands boasts beaches and pirate coves, Greenland has the world’s second largest ice sheet. The Virgin isles are a place of stiff rums rather than grizzled whale meats in the frosty expanse of Greenland.
But more than a century ago top U.S. officials saw in the Virgin Islands what Trump’s administration sees in Greenland: key military positions off American shores, as well as an ideal position along burgeoning trade routes.
Private White House communications under Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president, evince a menacing determination similar to the 46th president’s recent words “We’ll get Greenland. Yeah. 100%”
In a letter to Wilson in 1915, then Secretary of State Robert Lansing tells the president about an “embarrassing question” a Danish diplomat asked.
If Denmark didn’t strike a deal to sell the Islands, would American troops take them by force, the diplomat wanted to know.
“I told the Minister that while I had not had in mind such action,” Lansing says to Wilson, “I could conceive of circumstances which would compel such an act.”
The Danish minister says losing St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix will “be felt as a great national loss” but the Danes moved quickly to complete the sale.
“There are plenty of moments of the U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands which have close parallels to the quizzical ways Trump and the Trump administration have been talking about the U.S. relationship with Greenland,” Christopher Nichols, a Woodrow Wilson scholar at the Ohio State University, told USA TODAY.
“But here’s where it gets really Trumpian,” he says of Lansing’s threat to the Danes.
A sticking point in the sale of the Caribbean islands had been whether or not residents would become citizens. But the Danes cave at Lansing’s chilling suggestion.
“Guess what,” Nichols says, “they agreed to the no citizenship thing right away.”
The Danish West Indies became the U.S. Virgin Islands for $25 million in gold and on March 31, 1917, the American flag goes up on the Islands in place of the Dannebrog, and so began a ceremony now commemorated on the islands as Transfer Day.
As Trump and his administration ramp up efforts to transfer another Danish territory, here’s what to know about the last time the U.S. aimed to take Danish territory and how it wound up for those in the middle.
Why did the U.S. want the Virgin Islands?
The 28th president’s ambitions to take the Danish West Indies were much like the reasons given by the 47th president over a century later: strategic. New world powers were emerging then, trade routes were at stake and nations were aiming to snatch up critical junctures before their adversaries.
American officials dating back to at least the administration of the 18th president, Andrew Jackson, wanted a naval base in the Caribbean and saw the then-Danish islands as the best option, according to historians. Washington also wanted to secure the new trade routes created with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, much like Trump’s interest in securing burgeoning trade through the Arctic.
The nation’s rival then wasn’t China or Russia but Germany. Disparate states unified in 1871 to form Imperial Germany and the empire rapidly became an industrial powerhouse.
America and Germany soon found themselves in stiff opposition and U.S. officials, again, raised the possibility of securing the Islands.
“We should acquire the Danish Islands… no strong European power, and especially not Germany, should be allowed to gain a foothold by supplanting some weak European power,” then Assistant Secretary of the Navy – later the 26th president – Theodore Roosevelt writes in a letter in 1897. “I do not fear England; Canada, is a hostage for her good behavior; but I do fear some of the other powers.”
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 and fears that Germany would absorb Danish territory made the matter into a more urgent issue than ever for Washington.
When asked what would “compel” the U.S. to take the Islands by force, Lansing told the Danish minister in 1915 that “the possible consequence of absorption of Denmark by a great power would create a situation which it would be difficult to meet other than by occupation of the Islands.”
Today, the Islands mark the easternmost point of the U.S. territory. The Islands never became the significant naval base U.S. officials once envisioned but they remain a popular destination for American vacationers.
Around 87,000 people live on the Islands which cover some 135 square miles, according to U.S. Census data.
Why does Trump want Greenland?
The White House’s determination to make Greenland part of the United States brings the ambitions of presidents like Wilson and Roosevelt into a whole new century.
This time it’s not about Germany, the Panama Canal and protecting America’s southern coast. It’s about U.S. adversary China, a thawing Arctic creating more opportunities for trade through the Northwest Passage and missile defense systems helmed by the U.S. Space Force.
“We have an obligation to protect the world,” Trump said of his ambitions to take Greenland. “This is world peace, this is international security. And I have that obligation while I’m president.”
American troops are already stationed in Greenland at Pituffik Space Base, where Vance spoke last month. The base hosts missile defense early warning radar systems and is strategically located above NORAD radar installations in Canada designed to detect missile launches against North America crossing the Arctic.
The Arctic Ocean provides a shortcut for ships traveling between the U.S. and Asia and between Europe and Asia, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. The distance is about 40% less than routes using the Panama Canal or the Suez Canal.
Greenland also offers a trove of rare earth minerals, of which the U.S. was a top producer until China took over. The island is estimated to have the eighth-largest reserve of rare earths. Gaining access to them would reduce U.S. reliance on China – though the Chinese have already invested in Greenland mining projects.
What did Islanders get out of the transfer?
Trump and Vance have tried to sell Greenlanders on the idea that joining the United States would be an improvement on Denmark but the story of the Virgin Islands contains some cautionary lessons.
America did improve life on the Islands in many ways, historian Isaac Dookhan writes in A History of the Virgin Islands of the United States. Schools, emergency services and hospitals were all upgraded over what had been in place under Danish rule.
But the economy still flagged – another main reason for Denmark to sell the land – and Islanders continued emigrating. Conditions deteriorated to the point that President Herbert Hoover called the Islands the “effective poorhouse” of the U.S. after visiting in 1931.
Congress didn’t confer U.S. citizenship on Islanders until 1927. The U.S. began granting them some self-governance in 1936 but Islanders still cannot vote for president and the delegate that they send to Washington cannot vote in Congress.
“We’ve come a long way since 1917 . . . It took us a long while to become citizens, as far as we are,” Donna Christensen, a former longtime delegate to Congress from the Virgin Islands, told USA TODAY.
But a few issues Christensen perennially battled over in Congress leave the Islanders as effective second-class citizens: the inability to vote for president and the fact that Medicaid funding is capped, unlike for states.
“Healthcare is the one where I think not having state-like treatment has hurt us the most,” Christensen said.
The median household income on the Islands is around $40,000, compared to around $72,000 for the United States, according to the Federal Reserve. Around 23% of the population lives under the federal poverty rate – compared to 11% for the U.S. Meanwhile, the average home price is $291,000, just 10% less than in the U.S.
By contrast, Greenland receives the same robust social benefits afforded to people in Denmark, including free healthcare and free education.
Would the Islands be better off as part of Denmark?
Shelley Moorhead, a former minister of state for external affairs for the Islands, describes their status as a U.S. territory in bleak terms. “We are a third world country with an American flag,” says the native of St. Croix, the largest island.
But when asked whether the Islands would prefer to remain part of Denmark, Moorhead gave a resounding no.
“We appreciate Denmark’s affection – the people-to-people affection we have – but you got to understand we are not fish on a colonial wharf to be passed between empires,” he said. “That is what makes Trump’s advance towards Greenland so abhorrent, this is no longer the age of empire.”
Moorhead today is the president of the African-Caribbean Reparations & Resettlement Alliance, a group trying to secure reparations from Denmark for the nearly 200 years the Nordic country practiced slavery on the Islands.
The Danes abolished the practice after a slave rebellion in 1848, which led to conditions where a forced sale of the Islands actually benefited Denmark. Amid new labor costs and high security costs needed to prevent labor union strikes over still poor working conditions, the Islands began running a recurring deficit for Denmark.
“The very purpose of colonialism, namely economic gain for the colonizing power, no longer existed for Denmark,” writes William Boyer in America’s Virgin Islands: A History of Human Rights and Wrongs.
Neither Denmark nor the U.S. have lived up to their principles regarding human rights and democracy when it the Virgin Islands, Moorhead argues.
Denmark effectively absolved itself of responsibility for enslaving Islanders and the U.S. has left Islanders under the same undemocratic conditions that “led the 13 colonies to revolt against the king,” he says.
“We are owed a great debt and we have been disenfranchised and marginalized for too long,” Moorhead says. “The right to self-determination is a human right, an inalienable human right and it was violated.”
Michael Loria is a national reporter on the USA TODAY breaking news desk. Contact him at [email protected], @mchael_mchael or on Signal at (202) 290-4585.