This year marks the 101st-year anniversary of America’s last acquisition of territory, the purchase of the Danish West Indies, subsequently renamed by island leaders as the Virgin Islands and approved by the U.S. Congress.
It wasn’t a big deal, by any stretch of the imagination; in the 1850s, their total population was only about 41,000, today; less than 105,000. The land area is small, about 134 square miles, with three main islands and many small ones. Of all the nation’s territorial expansion efforts, this last was the only one that went into the history books as an unemotional footnote — a whimper — unlike most of the previous acquisitions.
But after a century as a U.S. territory, the Virgin Islands are in deep financial trouble, with mounting debt ($6.5 billion) and an economy with little likelihood of improvement. As with another territory, Puerto Rico, which has recently received some congressional life support, inattention has been the more prominent payment by the Office of Insular Affairs, a unit of the Interior Department, that oversees American territories.
