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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 |
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| | Structural Change? |
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< | 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: |
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< | *Why or to what benefit did the US government enact its land policies in Guam? |
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> | 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: |
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< | *And how did land agitation intersect with Guamanian movements for
emancipation from martial rule? |
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> | *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? |
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| | 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.
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. |
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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 ..." |
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> | from Destiny's Landfall, 114 (emphasis added). |
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> | 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). |
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< | Often Guamanians' frustration with martial rule centered on land issues, and were tied to cultural aspects of property law on the island. |
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> | 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. |
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< | *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) |
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> | 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). |
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< | *Prevalence of unsurveyed land or inadequately surveyed land - provided scope for government to take advantage of ambiguities in Guamanian
land holdings |
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> | 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. |
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< | *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 |
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> | 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. |
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< | This matrix contributed to disparate examples of Guamanians being uprooted. |
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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). |
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< | 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: |
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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) |
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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). |
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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. |
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>
> | cite |
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> | (note over a Harlan dissent) |
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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. |
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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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< | More to come:
- walkout.pdf: article on Guam congressional walkout in 1949/ Organic Act
- land.pdf: article on land use and political history of land
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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) |
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