In the early twentieth century, Danish and American diplomats quietly explored a land swap so audacious it sounded like satire: Denmark would hand over Greenland to Washington, and in return the United States would help it reclaim territory in Europe. The plan never left the drawing board, but the episode reveals how both countries once treated the Arctic island as a bargaining chip rather than a self-governing homeland.
More than a century later, that failed 1910 proposal still shapes how I think about power, prestige, and the limits of American expansion. The idea that Denmark might trade away Greenland, and that America would ultimately balk, exposes the gap between imperial ambition and political reality in an era when maps were still being redrawn by diplomats’ pens.
The audacious 1910 land swap that never happened
The 1910 scheme began with a bold suggestion from the U.S. envoy in Copenhagen, who imagined a three way bargain involving Denmark, the United States, and a rising Germany. In his proposal, Denmark would cede Greenland to Washington, the United States would then pressure Berlin to return the northern duchies of Schleswig-Holstein to Copenhagen, and Germany would be compensated with American controlled territory in the Pacific. The plan treated islands and borderlands as interchangeable assets, to be shuffled between empires in pursuit of strategic advantage and national pride.
According to later reconstructions of the episode, the U.S. ambassador, Maurice Francis Egan, framed the idea as a “very audacious suggestion” in a letter to the Assistant Secretary of State, reflecting how extraordinary it was even by the standards of the age. Reporting on the episode notes that Egan’s concept would have required Berlin to accept a trade that reversed its gains in Schleswig-Holstein in exchange for land near the Philippines, potentially including parts of Mindanao. Archival accounts indicate that within the State Department, some officials apparently entertained the logic of acquiring Greenland through this triangular deal, but the broader U.S. government ultimately rejected the notion as politically unworkable and diplomatically explosive, especially given the sensitivities around German ambitions in Europe and the Pacific.
Why Denmark was willing to part with Greenland
To understand why Copenhagen might even consider surrendering Greenland, it helps to recall Denmark’s precarious position in Europe at the time. The kingdom had lost Schleswig-Holstein to Germany in the nineteenth century, a humiliation that continued to haunt Danish politics. Regaining that territory would have restored a sense of national completeness that far outweighed, in elite eyes, the value of a distant Arctic colony. In that calculus, Greenland was a remote possession with limited infrastructure and a small population, while Schleswig-Holstein was a lost heartland on the European mainland.
At the same time, Denmark’s relationship with Greenland was already complicated. The island’s Indigenous Inuit communities had long histories that predated European rule, and Copenhagen’s control was more notional than direct across much of the vast territory. Later historical work on the island’s past, from Inuit settlement to Norse colonies and modern Danish rule, underscores how Greenland’s status shifted repeatedly as outside powers recalibrated their interests. When Nazi Germany occupied Denmark during World War II, Copenhagen’s direct authority over Greenland was effectively severed, and the United States stepped in to build bases that it still uses today, a reminder that the island’s fate has often been decided far from its shores.
America’s long appetite for Greenland
The 1910 proposal did not emerge from nowhere. By then, Washington had already spent decades eyeing Greenland as part of a broader push to expand American influence across the Arctic and the North Atlantic. In the late nineteenth century, Secretary of State William Seward, fresh from buying Alaska, went on what one historian describes as a territory shopping spree, exploring options to acquire more northern holdings. Later accounts of this period note that in Feb, discussions of America’s Long History of Trying to Acquire Greenland trace how Seward’s ambitions helped normalize the idea that the United States might one day control the island, even if his immediate efforts did not bear fruit.
Those ambitions resurfaced repeatedly in the twentieth century. During the early Cold War, President Harry Truman offered $100 million to buy Greenland outright, a proposal that Denmark rejected as it reasserted its sovereignty after the trauma of occupation. Analysts who have reconstructed this history point out that the same pattern kept repeating: American strategists saw Greenland’s location between North America and Europe as vital for air and later missile defense, while Danish leaders weighed those pressures against domestic politics and their evolving relationship with the island’s residents. A later overview of these episodes notes that as the Cold War began, President Truman’s offer was rebuffed, even as Washington continued to invest heavily in bases and radar sites on Greenlandic soil, a legacy that still shapes U.S. military posture in the Arctic.
From West Indies to Virgin Islands: what America did buy instead
While the Greenland swap died in committee, the United States did move ahead with a more conventional purchase from Denmark in the same era. Through The Treaty of the Danish West Indies, formally titled the Convention between the United States and Denmar, Washington agreed to buy the Caribbean islands of Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix. The treaty, negotiated in Danish and English, turned the Danish West Indies into what are now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands, one of the last major territorial expansions of United States territory outside the Pacific.
American records of the transaction emphasize how carefully both sides managed the legal and political process. Subsequent approvals of the transfer were passed by both Danish houses and then ratified by King Christian X of Denmark, before the U.S. Senate gave its consent and the islands formally changed hands. A State Department history of the Purchase of the United States Virgin Islands notes that the territory remained under naval administration for decades and did not elect its own governor until 1970, underscoring how strategic acquisitions often preceded meaningful self government. In contrast, the 1910 Greenland plan never reached the treaty stage, which spared Washington from having to defend a far more controversial bargain in Congress and in public.
From rejection to recognition: how sovereignty was settled
Even after the 1910 idea collapsed, questions about who ultimately controlled Greenland lingered. When the United States bought the Danish West Indies, it also had to clarify that it did not claim any rights over Greenland as part of the broader rearrangement of Danish colonial holdings. That clarification came in the form of a formal statement from Washington, often referred to as USA’s declaration on Danish sovereignty of Greenland. In that document, the American government explicitly recognized that Greenland belonged to Denmark, including contested areas in north and east Greenland that had drawn foreign interest from the 1880s onward, and pledged not to challenge that status.
That recognition did not end American involvement on the island, but it did set the legal baseline for everything that followed. When Nazi forces occupied Denmark, U.S. officials treated Greenland as Danish territory temporarily cut off from its metropole, and negotiated defense agreements with local authorities rather than claiming the island outright. Later, as the Cold War intensified, Washington’s focus shifted to building and maintaining installations like Thule Air Base, while Copenhagen moved toward granting Greenland home rule and then expanded self government. Modern reference works on Greenland emphasize that it remains part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with its own parliament and growing autonomy, a far cry from the days when diplomats casually floated trading it away.
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