This’d be a different country if the Philippines and/or Cuba had voted to stay with us.
The sheer size of the Philippines would’ve prevented their statehood. With 100 million people, they’d have been entitled to 1/3rd the membership of Congress (although adjusted, would be 1/4th as the population of the U.S. would exceed 400m) or about 145 House members, most of them representing breathtakingly poverty-stricken areas and many of those would be Mohammadan Communists.
We’re fortunate the Filipinos wanted independence.
The South wanted Cuba to be a slave state. Of course, with the politics there, had Fidel been around if it had been made a state, he’d have just been another Democrat political boss, probably running the state from his lifetime Senate sinecure until going out feet first.