why did the us buy the virgin islands
History of the United States Virgin Islands The United States' first secretary in London, Henry White attempted to purchase the islands from Denmark in 1899 to resist European incursions into the Americas. The sale was unsuccessful and White attributed the failure to the influence of Kaiser Wilhelm II of the ascendent German Empire.[3] During World War I, the fear of rising German influence in the Caribbean region prompted the President Woodrow Wilson to assert the Roosevelt Corollary in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
United States Virgin Islands Previously the Danish West Indies of the Kingdom of Denmark–Norway, they were sold to the United States by Denmark in the Treaty of the Danish West Indies of 1916. They are classified by the U.N. as a Non-Self-Governing Territory, and are currently an organized, unincorporated United States territory. The U.S. Virgin Islands are organized under the 1954 Revised Organic Act of the Virgin Islands and have since held five constitutional conventions. The last and only proposed Constitution, adopted by the Fifth Constitutional Convention of the U.S. Virgin Islands in 2009, was rejected by the U.S. Congress in 2010, which urged the convention to reconvene to address the concerns Congress and the Obama Administration had with the proposed document. The Fifth Constitutional Convention of the U.S. Virgin Islands met in October 2012 to address these concerns, but was not able to produce a revised Constitution before its October 31 deadline.