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< | Note 1/25/09: I am in process of revising my project, expect to have more added in next week. AK | >
> | 5/15/2010: I have completed my project for the purposes of this class, and it is ready to be graded. However, I might continue to add or upload any relevant information/ analysis. Note that my revised essay is mid-way down the text of the wiki page. Thanks, AJK. | | | I am exploring the intersection of land policy and the cultural, social and political history of Guam, focusing on the US imperial project from the late-19th to mid-20th century. The overriding value of the territory to the US has been its strategic location in the Western Pacific. The martial logic of possessing the island has exerted a gravitational pull on the island's economic geography, as land owned by the indigenous Chamorro has gradually been transferred to the US govt/ military, through "conquer," tax default, eminent domain and outright purchase. | | | | |
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> | Structural Change? | | | | |
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< | Structural Change?
From 1898 to the mid-1950s, when the US first assumed "absolute dominion" of Guam per the Treaty of Paris, the Chamorro population evolved from being almost exclusively agricultural - marked by a decentralized peopling of the island in the form of a network of "village" or communal living arrangements, centered in a corpatist-collectivist ethos of governance, to a more urban, tertiary economy concomitant with nuclear-family living arrangements. At first blush, these brush strokes tend to the notion of a "structural transformation," a heuristic in development economics meant to capture the process whereby the engine or motive force of a developing country is re-positioned from a traditional elite/ peasant binary model of
food production to an educated middle-class capable of sustaining a post-agricultural dynamic. However, Guam in the 1940s or 1950s could not be described as industrial. In fact, it was government policy to purposely inhibit the economic development of the island. The US viewed Guamanian economic self-sufficiency (which effectively requires trade for a small island nation) as incompatible with the martial logic of possessing Guam, as a fortress or "Galapogos" in the security nexus of the Western Pacific. Rather this demographic change from rural, collecivist to semi-rural, nuclear is better understood as tracking the land law of Guam during the firt half of the century. My inquiry takes shape along the following questions: | >
> | From 1898 until the mid-1950s, the Chamorro population evolved from being almost exclusively agricultural - marked by a decentralized peopling of the island in the form of a network of "village" or communal living arrangements, centered in a corporatist-collectivist ethos of governance - to a more urban, tertiary economy concomitant with nuclear-family living arrangements. At first blush, these brush strokes tend to the notion of a "structural transformation," a heuristic in development economics meant to capture the process whereby the engine or motive force of a developing country is re-positioned from a traditional elite/ peasant binary model of food production to an educated middle-class capable of sustaining a post-agricultural dynamic. However, Guam in the 1940s or 1950s could not be described as industrial. In fact, it was government policy to purposely inhibit the economic development of the island (see US’ supposed need to control inflationary pressures). The US viewed Guamanian economic self-sufficiency (which effectively required trade for a small island nation) as incompatible with the martial logic of possessing Guam, as a fortress or "Galapagos" in the security nexus of the Western Pacific. Rather this demographic change from rural, collectivist to semi-rural, nuclear is better understood as tracking the land law of Guam during the first half of the century. My inquiry takes shape along the following questions: | | | *Why or to what benefit did the US government enact its land policies in Guam? | |
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< | *And how did land agitation intersect with Guamanian movements for emancipation from martial rule? | | | | |
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> | *And how did land agitation intersect with Guamanian movements for emancipation from martial rule? | | | | |
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> | Legal-Political Compass | | | | |
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< | Legal-Political Compass | | | Guam was surrendered to the US following the Spanish-American War, in accord with the Treaty of Paris. Article IX of that treaty stated: | | | Executive Order 108-A later placed Guam under the control of the Navy. On 12 January 1899 Navy Secretary Long selected Captain Richard P. Leary as naval governor. Leary received the following instructions: | |
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< | "Within the absolute domain of naval authority, which necessarily is and must remain supreme in the ceded territory untill the legislation
of the U.S. shall otherwise provide, the municipal [i.e. Spanish, better characterized as punitive Spanish laws] laws of the territory ... are to be considered as continuing in force ... the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. In fulfillment of this high mission ... there must be sedulously maintained the strong arm of authority ..."
from Destiny's Landfall, 114 (emphasis added).
The language here is ominous. Phrases like benevolent assimilation evoke images of the parallel benevolent despotism of early modern Europe. And
"assimilation" reminds one of e.g. the forced adoption policies of indigenous Aboriginal populations in Australia. With the only condition on American military governance being the poetic, though nebulous compass of the "sway of justice" it is not surprising that e.g. later Captain Leary would pontificate to his marine servicemen how he was the personification of the law: "I have the law. I am supreme"(in the tenor of the benevolent despotism of Louis XIV).
However, what should be emphasized is that Congress per the Treaty of Paris did have power, that they could have imposed a corrective to the problems of military rule. Instead Congress remained silent on Guamanian issues, providing a vacuum for the naval government to enact (or condone) policies inconsistent with basic notions of due process/ "fundamental fairness", equality in provision of laws and protection of private property. Petitions for such rights were denied repeatedly (first in 1901) and not granted until 1950.
Examples of this autocratic rule included the implementation of a 2-tiered wage scale (cite to reference), no trial by jury and no right to appeal beyond the island (including death penalty cases) and persistent land seizure. Indeed, the chronolgy of the US' initial moves in the island is evidence of the priority attached to land. The first general order by an American official on the island came from Captain Taussig in January 1899, to have the Spanish treasury books audited. The second was to seize all Spanish lands bordering the port of San Luis d'Apra (Destiny's Landfall 115).
Thus, the theory of "absolute domain" was taken seriously. However, in practice Spain's administration of the island was not total. One regulatory lacunae that would have later import was Spain's land survey techniques. The gaps and inconsistencies in the land record would be
used by the US naval government to siphon land from the Chamarro. The US expectedly took advantage of any ambiguities in its early administration. And, again, when the US provided compensation for destroyed lands during WW2 local local Chamarro had difficulty "proving" the scope of their "possession." Indeed, the legal status of land in Guam is in some ways a microcosm for the tensions between an Anglo-American paradigm of social practice and the Chamarro way of life. Notions of individual (and recorded) property and money were foreign to Chamorro
culture. A damning insult in the Chamarro language was to be "geftao" or stingy (cite to culture article). Like other pre-contact societies, land was imputed high value; however, it had little exchange value in the monetary sense until the twentieth century (Land Tenure in the Pacific, 4). After WW2 the Chamarro were still relatively apathetic to the substance of money; thus remuneration for eminent domain or for war-destroyed lands did not provide an equivalent utility. The Chamorro "indifference curve" did not comport with the Keynesian analytic of money itself having an independent value, e.g. in his discussion of the (ir)rationality of hoarding.
An early example of the type of Catch-22 situations that enveloped the Chamarros: in 1899, Guam's first military governor, Capt. Richard P. Leary issued "General Order No. 15," which required all landowners to register any land they wanted recognized by the new government. | >
> | "Within the absolute domain of naval authority, which necessarily is and must remain supreme in the ceded territory until the legislation of the U.S. shall otherwise provide, the municipal [i.e. Spanish, better characterized as punitive Spanish laws] laws of the territory ... are to be considered as continuing in force ... the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule. In fulfillment of this high mission ... there must be sedulously maintained the strong arm of authority ..." | | | | |
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< | "General Order No. 15 forced the Chamorros to make a choice: either register their properties accurately and lose them because they could not pay the taxes, or not register their lands and lose them because they were not properly registered ... when the naval government began finding 'mistakes' in the declaration of lot sizes, it began registering the lands as government property. Some of these declarations of 'Crown' land took place over 35 years after the U.S. took possession of Guam from Spain." (see Issues in Guam's Political Development: The Chamorro Perspective, 5). | >
> | from “Destiny's Landfall,” 114 (emphasis added; see also “We Fought the Navy …” 16). | | | | |
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< | Indeed, most of the land accreted to the US did not come from eminent domain.
*Land Tax not scaled to Guamanian economy - default, acquisition by
Navy/ government; Board of Appraisement determined land prices in
early 1900s, but prices outpaced market value or income (Souder 213) | >
> | This lexicon of “absolute domain” frames a colonialist association within the talismanic, self-justifying language of the law. Perhaps more ominous is the phrasing of “benevolent assimilation,” a euphemism that evokes the manifest destiny of westward white-American migration as well as certain social policies meant to homogenize or absorb different communities under pretexts of civilizing (a la the forced adoption policies of Aboriginal populations within Australia). With the only condition on American military governance being the poetic, though nebulous, compass of the "sway of justice" it is not surprising that e.g. later Captain Leary would pontificate to his marine servicemen how he was the personification of the law: "I have the law. I am supreme" (in the tenor of the benevolent despotism of early modern Europe). | | | | |
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> | Indeed, this early delegation of power to the military is representative of the narrative of Guam’s legal history (e.g. “War Plan Orange” proposed in 1910 to respond to Japanese threat). From early on Guam’s status would reflect its value as a security data point in the Pacific – as the island would seem to be represented as simply a “thing” or a place rather than a home to an actual people. And the fact that it was a thing remote from Washington D.C. would also have import (see discussions of geography and the law, i.e. law and the river). That Guam was essentially outside the purview of US lawmakers would produce an awkward composite of governance structures on the island: in some ways, the island seemed to be a paradigm of autocratic military rule, where fundamental constitutional protections were withheld from the population and policies were enacted to limit local economic freedom. Indeed, local petitions for such rights started as early as 1901 (see Destiny’s Landfall, 125). | | | | |
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> | On the other hand, this vacuum of military rule was never quite “filled” by the US navy. Ambiguities and gaps in US’ government policy indicated an orientation to military needs. Aspects of governance outside this purely military logic were thus sometimes superficial. | | | | |
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> | For example, although land was integral to government policy (see fact that the second general order by an American official on the island was to seize all lands bordering the port of San Luis dApra (Destiny’s Landfall, 115)), mistake and ad hoc rulemaking characterized US land policy in Guam. Three months after his arrival Captain Leary issued General Order No. 15, requiring local landowners to register their lands if they wanted them to be recognized. This order thus produced a sort of Hobson’s choice for the Chamorro – either to register their lands but then lose them because they could not afford the associated taxes or to not register their lands and risk being found out by the government (see article on land use and political history). Such a policy is illustrative of the social and political contexts of the island. First, worth noting is the traditional notions of value imputed to land in Chamorro society. I agree it is bad scholarship to set the turn-of-the-century Chamorro too firmly in an anthropological ontology or as a pre-contact people somewhat static or separate from the telos of History. Still, there seems to be some truth to the claims (see Western historians and revisionist Chamorro historians/ social thinkers in bibliography/ web links) that the Chamorro did not seem to attach economic value to the substance of money (contra Keynes). And although land was highly appreciated; some commentators have still distinguished Chamorro land use in noting that it lacked exchange value (see introduction to “Land Tenure in the Pacific”). This distinction reflects a communitarian, almost spiritual, ethos often ascribed to land in non-Western societies. Indeed, the architectural history of twentieth century Guam is marked by this need to incorporate communal living within the new kind of Western, single-family style housing that has evolved simultaneous to land fragmentation (see article on post-WW2 resettlement). This culture of unalienable, shared land use would be problematic in relation to the new emphasis on registration, as it was not usually easy to point to (especially written) records. The US was able to cite these “mistakes” or gaps in the land record as reason to declare it government property. | | | | |
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> | This early land law is also indicative of the ad hoc, awkward policymaking that marked US’ rule. Compounding this register/don’t register dilemma was that the land tax was not properly scaled to the Guamanian economy. The Board of Appraisement was charged with determining the value of land for tax purposes, and “although rates were changed in 1903, 1910 and 1925” (see Guam, “Land Tenure in a Fortress” 213), these “rates did not keep pace with market value or income.” What is potentially surprising is that the US government acquired more land from tax defaults than e.g. use of eminent domain/ citing military need. | | | | |
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< | Equally important in shaping the legal-political framework of the island was the aggregate holding of the Insular Cases at the turn-of-the-century. | >
> | Still, it somewhat unfair to intimate at a military/ rule of law binary for governance of the island. Congress seemed to be complicit (if only because of indifference) with military rule. Congress per the Treaty of Paris could have imposed a corrective to the excesses of the naval government if they chose to (see for example, the use of a “dual” or later “triple wage system” that legally required that local Chamorro receive less pay for the same work (in violation of equal protection of the law) (see e.g. “Island in Agony”); see also laws against work absenteeism (consistent with class discussion of Pinkerton/ Homestead Strike) in violation of substantive due process). Instead, the image portrayed by the (lack) of historical evidence is that Congress was indifferent to Guam’s plight. | | | | |
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> | Per the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution was inapplicable to the territories (era of “reverse incorporation”). It made two further distinctions that specifically removed Guam from the ambit of its scope. Justice White provides an “incorporated/unincorporated” binary founded in the logic of separating those territories that may potentially becomes a state (Downes v. Bidwell, 21 S.Ct. 770, 798 (1901); Guam would remain an unincorporated territory). The Insular Cases would also clarify a distinction between “organized” and “unorganized” territories, the latter (a la Guam) having not yet received an “organic act” to establish local self-government (“Destiny’s Landfall,” 126). Some historians have considered a racial logic to be at work in this denial of Guam’s constitutional protections. Although I agree that there was certainly elements of racism in American rule of Guam (evidenced by e.g. segregation in jobs and housing, also miscegenation laws (that were still not taken very seriously by young servicemen)), race could not have been the dispositive factor in determining why the Chamorro were not permitted to be citizens, given that Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands were granted both US citizenship by the 1920s (see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puerto_Rico#United_States_colony). It would seem that this same racist ontology would affect all of these similarly situated islands. Instead, my intuition is that the main reason Congress did not try to moderate or overrule the Insular Cases vis-a-vis Guam was simply that they were indifferent or unaware of Guam's plight, an example of "out of sight, out of mind," given their remote distance across the Pacific. | | | | |
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< | (note over a Harlan dissent) | >
> | Although I've come across different petitions from Guamanians to Congress, I haven't really identified any sources of Congress discussing whether to give Guam citizenship. The situation is sort of the reciprocal of the 1763 Emancipation Proclamation, where a lack of historical evidence could be attributed to Appalachian setters simply ignoring the law. Here, the rule makers themselves ignored the Insular Cases and their connection to Guam, to the frustration of those ruled. | | | | |
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< | Not only were there distinctions between identified as "organized"/ "unorganized" territory but also between those that were
"incorporated"/ "unincorporated." Guam's identification as an organized territory meant that it was outside the scope of the Constitution. Some historians have considered race to be the main factor in this denial of constitutional protections. Although I agree that there was certainly elements of racism in American rule of Guam (evidenced by eg segregation in jobs, housing, miscegenation laws (that were still not taken very seriously by young servicemen) and dual wage systems), race could not have been the dispositive factor in determining why the Chamorro were not permitted to be citizens, given that Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands were granted both US citizenship by the 1920s. It would seem that this same racist ontology would affect all of these similarly situated islands. Instead, my intuition is that the main reason Congress did not try to
moderate or overrule the Insular Cases vis-a-vis Guam was simply that they were indifferent or unaware of Guam's plight, an example of "out of sight, out of mind," given their remote distance across the Pacific. | >
> | The Organic Act and Land | | | | |
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< | Although I've come across different petitions from Guamanians to Congress, I haven't really identified any sources of Congress discussing whether to give Guam citizenship. The situation is sort of the reciprocal of the 1763 Emancipation Proclamation, where a lack of historical evidence could be attributed to Appalachin setters simply ignoring the law. Here, the rulemakers themselves ignored the Insular Cases and their connection to Guam, to the frustration of those ruled. | | | | |
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> | After WW2 there was a renewed push for self-governance on Guam. Again, this movement is connected to the historical themes of balancing security and civil rights, as well as land as a prism for local rule. There is an important temporal aspect at play here. In class, we discussed how the major world-historical questions (e.g. whether to have a civil war) are decided by political rather than legal calculi. This same thinking might be animating the words of Admiral Pownall when he stated in October 1947 that he favored citizenship for Guamanians and that their citizenship was “a matter of law” (“We Fought the Navy…” 97). It is significantly easier for a naval official to make such a claim after a war rather than before. | | | | |
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< | land as distinguishably important in Organic Act of 1950,
reflective of communitarian ethos (some evidence that constitutional protections against arbitrary deprivation of land as more important than other civil/ political rights) | >
> | Worth emphasizing is that discussion of land autonomy continued to guide this debate on citizenship and constitutional protection. Land mismanagement persisted into the 1940s. Land compensation (for both usurped and destroyed/bombed lands) was viewed as more problematic than land acquisition (though citing “military need” for e.g. public beaches didn’t go over well, see “We Fought the Navy…” 117; see also article on “Walkout” at 60). For example, the same inflationary worries that required a stratified wage system also meant paying the Chamorro in 1947 at prices based on 1941 appraisal records despite 100% inflation (“Destiny’s Landfall,” 215). Still, I was surprised by how much emphasis I found on land policy as opposed to e.g. oppression per civil-political freedoms such as freedom of the press. Perhaps this reflects broader contestations over the universality of human rights norms, e.g. notions that things like “freedom of speech” are bourgeois rights, or that people have a social duty to respect land use rather than a personal right to exploit it. However, important to this debate over the passage of the Organic Act of 1950 also seemed to be the pervasive fear that the US military government was able to act arbitrarily (see article on “Walkout”). Thus, perhaps land is better recognized as a focus for how military rule conflicted with notions of due process, rather than a right hierarchical to other constitutional protections. In any event, after a half-century of – at least attempted – absolute domain over the island, Section 28 of the Organic Act would specify the (re)transfer of all government lands not specifically claimed by President Truman to the new Government of Guam (see the Organic Act, 64). | | |
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