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" (Cite) 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:

*Why or to what benefit did the US government enact its land policies in Guam?

*And how did land agitation intersect with Guamanian movements for emancipation from martial rule?

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:

Article IX. The civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States shall be determined by Congress.

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:

"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.

The language here is ominous. Phrases like benevolent assimilation evoke images of the same 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 with brutal sincerity such things as "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. eg due process, equal treatment, land

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.

cite

(note Harlan dissent)

Not only were there distinctions made between territories identified as "organized" or "unorganized" but also between those that were "incorporated" or "unincorporated" (unincorporated territories are not meant to become states, Guam remains such a territory). Guam's identification as an unorganized, unincorporated territory meant that it was substantially 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 were certainly elements of racism in American rule of Guam (evidenced by eg the tenor of the Insular Cases, Guamanian 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 the comparative fact that Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands were both granted US citizenship by the 1920s. It would seem that this same racist thinking or legal ontology would affect all of these similarly situated parties. 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 to or unaware of Guam's plight, an example of "out of sight, out of mind" thinking given their remote distance across the Pacific.

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.

Often Guamanians' frustration with martial rule centered on land issues, and were tied to cultural aspects of property law on the island.

*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)

*Prevalence of unsurveyed land or inadequately surveyed land - provided scope for government to take advantage of ambiguities in Guamanian land holdings

*Lack of a money economy; more generally collectivist notions of property - not yet a Keynesian value imputed to money as money, but in Guam only the land itself had meaning, e.g. compensation for eminent domain/ war damage not particularly helpful

This matrix contributed to disparate examples of Guamanians being uprooted.

An early example of the type of Catch-22 situations that enveloped the Chamarro; in 1899, military governor/ Captain Leary issued "General Order No. 15," which required all landowners to register any land they wanted to have recognized by the new government. One historian describes the effective Hobson's choice:

"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).