The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  We would have to weigh those as a cost to vote for president, John wrote. He and everyone else I spoke to said most Virgin Islanders favored the status quo. It wasn’t just about taxes but a fear of the unknown, a sense of we’ve-got-it-good-enough, and a fundamental distrust of the American government to really, truly put them on equal footing, economically, politically, or otherwise.

  The issue was the focus of a Status Commission that was planned to convene in early 1990, but it was canceled after the destruction caused by Hurricane Hugo. Local dignitaries took to the newspapers’ editorial pages to voice their opinions, with nothing even close to a consensus. Some argued to keep the status quo, others wanted independence. Or statehood. Or commonwealth status, like Puerto Rico. The whole range of possibilities.

  Three years later, the USVI held a referendum on the political status, with options for staying a territory, becoming a state, or becoming independent. More than 80 percent of voters favored maintaining territorial status—but only 30 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot at all, and 50 percent turnout was required for the results to be binding, so they were invalidated. There has not been another referendum.

  The attempts to set up a territorial constitution—which would take the place of the Revised Organic Act of 1954 and would be a necessary precursor to a statehood push—have met similar fates. Constitutional conventions met in 1964, 1971, 1977, and 1980, but all failed to agree on terms. In 2010, the Fifth Constitutional Convention sent a draft constitution to Governor John de Jongh, who promptly rejected it. Foremost among de Jongh’s objections was a section granting special privileges to “native Virgin Islanders” (born here) or “ancestral native Virgin Islanders” (people whose ancestors lived in the islands prior to 1932, when American citizenship was officially extended to the territory). For example, ancestral native Virgin Islanders would be exempt from property taxes, and only native Virgin Islanders would be allowed to run for governor. The proposed provisions highlighted the feeling, among many island natives, that they deserve a greater voice in what happens to their homeland; de Jongh, however, called them “inconsistent with basic tenets of equal protection and fairness as established by the United States Constitution.” A lawsuit forced him to forward the draft to Congress and the Obama administration, both of which rejected it for much the same reasons. In 2012, USVI delegates reconvened to start over, but again could not reach an agreement.

  ON MY last day in Saint Croix, I walked to the Budget car rental office in Christiansted to finally try this whole driving-on-the-left thing. My mind was a newsreel of predicted crashes: being flattened by a semi, soaring over a cliff edge and onto kayaking tourists below, plowing into an obeah shrine. I signed up for every conceivable insurance policy and some inconceivable ones—the clerk kept inventing, I kept buying. I sat in the car psyching myself up for a few minutes, until the clerk came outside to ask if I was okay. With a nervous nod, I started the car, cranked up Da Vybe, and puttered east.

  First stop: Estate Whim, a former sugar plantation, where I hoped to get a deeper history lesson than I’d found at the Saint Thomas Historical Trust Museum. Da Vybe was playing a bouncy kids’ song about the months of the year, creating an incongruously cheery feel as I pulled into a long, shaded driveway and parked in an empty lot. On the porch of the estate’s great house I was greeted by a docent, Mr. Meyers, a tall, soft-spoken black man in a coral polo shirt and dreadlocks. He took me on a long tour of the house, offering a dissertation on the materials and design of each piece of furniture: a mahogany bed, a side table hiding a chamber pot.

  We came to a lounge chair, with a low-angle back and long, straight arms that almost looked like skis. “Do you know what this is?” Mr. Meyers asked.

  I shook my head.

  He sat down and swung his legs onto the arms. “It’s designed to help the master take off his shoes. He feels so stiff after a long day watching the fields. He just wants to relax.” Mr. Meyers sold the scene well; I empathized with this poor, fatigued master.

  Then we went out to the porch and Mr. Meyers started pointing at the other parts of the estate—the slave quarters, the kitchen building, the field—and said that everything else was self-guided. “And over there are some gravestones of slaves,” Mr. Myers said, pointing to a weed-choked lawn. “Those are my ancestors. So you can look at that, too.” Their aches got no elaboration. “And right here is the gift shop,” Mr. Meyers added. With that, he went off to greet a freshly arrived busload of Danes.

  I wandered the grounds for a while, reading the plaques—half of which were faded to illegibility—and eventually ended up by the old sugar mill, where the Danes were gathered with their own guide, who was giving a long lecture in Danish, captivating to them, useless to me.

  As I drove off, I recalled Anne’s comments about the ubiquity of her compatriots in the USVI, and something clicked. They come to the territory in droves, specifically for the history, for the portal to their nineteenth century glory days. The American tourists come for the beaches and the shopping. The museums and historic sites, intentionally or not, reflect this imbalance and tailor their content to their ticket-buying audience: the Danes. History is written not just by the victors but by those who are most eager to underwrite it.

  All of this skews the story that’s told. And this is compounded, I later learned, by the fact that most primary documents about the transfer and the early American era are held at the U.S. National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the majority of materials from the Danish era are in Danish and held in Copenhagen, at the Danish National Archives (which in 2012 began scanning two hundred fifty linear miles of documents, with plans to put them online in 2017, in time for the hundredth anniversary of the transfer).

  It’s difficult for Virgin Islanders to research their own history, because it has literally been taken away from them, as Jeannette Allis Bastian discusses in her book Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History. One noteworthy example is the story of Buddhoe, the slave I’d seen memorialized in Emancipation Garden in Charlotte Amalie. He’s a local legend, a folk hero, who famously led the 1847 rebellion that led to emancipation of all Danish West Indies slaves, after gathering thousands of his comrades in Saint Croix and taking over the fort in Frederiksted, where I was headed now. Anne the Dane had told me that a friend of hers had uncovered evidence at the Danish National Archives that Buddhoe wasn’t the rebellion leader—that, in fact, he wasn’t even a real person, purely a myth. What Anne didn’t mention, but I later learned, was the considerable public outcry after her friend offered this new narrative. It wasn’t just the challenge to the Virgin Islands’ collective memory and identity that angered locals, but its source: an outsider, using colonial-era documents held half a world away. And, not incidentally, the findings directly contradicted those of another scholar who’d pored over the same materials in 1984 and concluded that the core of the Buddhoe legend was true.

  In Frederiksted, I made my way to a waterfront park, where there was another Buddhoe statue, blowing his conch shell. A dozen or so tourists, wearing lanyards from the cruise ship docked at the town’s pier, loitered in the park, comparing purchases from the cluster of vendors who’d set up shop nearby. On the street, a parked car blasted a reggae tune with a mournful plaint.

  I sat in the park, listening and thinking, until the song ended and I recalled that I had an altogether more frivolous task to undertake while I was on this side of Saint Croix: I had a tip about a nearby bar. It had come from one of Sheldon’s friends, a guy named Mike, whose drinking-establishment recommendation I knew I could trust because he was from New Jersey and wore a gold Tasmanian Devil necklace.

  WHICH WAS HOW I ended up at the Montpellier Domino Club, the rum bar in the jungle with the beer-drinking pigs out back, and the crew of regulars—Leon, Ray, Linda—holding court. I sat there long enough, soaking up the camaraderie, that Norma, the owner, comped me a drink. She mixed me a concoction she called Cheesecake, with vanilla
Cruzan rum and pineapple and cranberry juice, and then told me to introduce myself so that everybody would know my name.

  So now it was official: this was the rain-forest version of Cheers. Even when I’d pictured monkeys in malls when I first imagined the territories, I hadn’t actually expected this sort of thing, nor I had imagined that, in fact, it would feel so natural.

  Just then, a dreadlocked Rasta tour guide walked up with a seventyish Danish tourist couple.

  “Pigs running, Norma?”

  “No, they’re all worn out for today.”

  The three decided to stay, joining our conversation and completing our tableau. Of all the possible embodiments of the American melting pot, I had never considered that one might be a Rasta and a pair of Danish tourists sharing brightly colored cocktails mixed by a Trinidadian in a West Indies jungle bar.

  But here it was, and it was glorious.

  I texted Maren: This is the good life.

  She wrote back: Next time, I’m coming with you.

  * Singular, because at that point there was only one.

  † The budget, I later learned, provides more money for the territory’s public television station than for the Department of Agriculture.

  ‡ It’s also useful for making an explosive called nitroguanidine.

  § The official name of the neighboring British territory is simply the Virgin Islands.

  ¶ The safaris are all rather ad hoc, from the benches to the way you signal your stop, by pressing a doorbell wired to the roof. The whole setup makes a state-dweller recall both Developing World Transportation Disaster Tropes (“We’re going to crash on one of those windy roads, I know it”) and Inspiring Horatio Alger Stories (“What entrepreneurism! What DIY charm! That’s the American way!”).

  # I hadn’t told John and Karen about my driving tour with Sheldon and Dexter, but John emailed a few days later to say that he’d heard them talking about me on their radio show, and that Sheldon had also confessed to driving on the Buccaneer golf cart path.

  Chapter 2

  FOREIGN

  IN A

  DOMESTIC

  SENSE

  American Samoa

  I ARRIVED HOME FROM THE USVI WITH A TAN AND a million questions.

  My trek across the territories had begun largely as a catalog of Americana at its most far-flung and mixed-up. The history and culture were fascinating, to be sure, but I’d also stumbled across political and legal issues that had left me with all sorts of questions: How, when, and why had the empire gotten weird? Why were there so many differences compared to the states, particularly with regard to the myriad laws that shape everyday life? And why were the territories still territories, rather than states?

  It was becoming clear that if I really, truly wanted to understand these places, I’d have to roll up my sleeves and dig into the esoteric details. I searched again for books that examined the territories in a broad, all-encompassing sort of way, and found precisely one: Defining Status: A Comprehensive Analysis of United States Territorial Policy by Arnold Leibowitz, more than seven hundred pages long and published in 1989. There were also a few academic works focusing on legal matters, including Does the Constitution Follow the Flag?; Colonial Constitutionalism; and, most helpful, Foreign in a Domestic Sense. I bought them, opened them, and panicked: even to an interested reader, they were dense and daunting.

  I needed some help. I called up Columbia Law Professor Christina Duffy Ponsa, one of the editors of Foreign in a Domestic Sense.* Months earlier, she had also presented at a conference hosted by the Harvard Law School to examine the history and legal issues regarding the territories. It was a one-day event and the first such conference since Ponsa organized one at Yale in 1998. In the opening remarks, the dean of the Harvard Law School noted that in all her years of study and teaching, she had never once discussed the territories.

  When I told Professor Ponsa what I was looking for, she laughed and said, “Simple!” She spent more than an hour walking me through the basics and standing by as a massive thunderstorm in Minneapolis kept knocking out reception on my end.

  Ponsa’s answers all pointed back to the turn of the twentieth century, the USA’s so-called Imperial Moment. “That’s what the historical actors at the time see as the question: Can we do empire?” she said. “In the wake of the Civil War, the federal government has become more powerful and the United States is now flexing its muscle on the international stage and European powers have been annexing colonies, so the question arises, Do we do this, too?”

  The nation’s answer: “Let’s go for it!” In 1898, the United States annexed Hawaii and then claimed Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War. In 1900, it added American Samoa to its holdings. In a flash, the scope of the American empire had grown from the North America continent and assorted guano-covered islands to distant, populated corners of the map.

  Ponsa spoke animatedly and rapidly, and I could imagine her in a lecture hall, gesturing and pausing every now and then to make sure everyone was keeping up.

  “Right,” I said.

  “Okay,” she continued, racing onward. “And as people look at these places”—these newly acquired islands, so far away and with cultures so seemingly different from the USA’s—“they can’t quite imagine them being states. So the debate heats up: Can we take places that we don’t intend to make states? It’s primarily a constitutional debate: Does the Constitution permit the U.S. to do this? And the question makes its way to the Supreme Court.”

  The resulting set of cases are known, collectively, as the Insular Cases (because they affect the insular areas, the parts of the USA that aren’t states); there were approximately two dozen, the primary of which were decided between 1901 and 1922.† The key case, the one that underlies all the others, was Downes v. Bidwell, in 1901, which began with a tax on oranges shipped from Puerto Rico to New York. The Constitution forbids taxation on interstate commerce, so the issue was whether this was true of commerce with Puerto Rico, and, more to the point, whether Puerto Rico and the other newly acquired territories were part of the United States in strict constitutional terms. The court said no: the territories belonged to the USA but were not wholly part of it. Therefore, Congress could decide what laws and parts of the Constitution did and did not apply to territories, treating them like states or like foreign countries, depending on the mood.

  What Downes v. Bidwell established was this key principle: American soil does not necessarily mean all American laws apply. Or, as the academics put it, the Constitution does not follow the flag.

  Adding the territories to the nation as true equals, on the traditional path to statehood, the court’s majority decision said, could be “a false step [that] might be fatal to the development of . . . the American empire.” The United States would likely continue to annex “distant possessions,” and, “If those possessions are inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought, the administration of government and justice, according to Anglo-Saxon principles, may for a time be impossible.”

  Puerto Rico was therefore “foreign in a domestic sense because the island had not been incorporated into the United States.” This is where we get the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories, which added a major and previously nonexistent step on the path to full statehood, and—

  Hold on, I said, asking Ponsa to back up to the language of the ruling. It really called these places “alien races” not capable of living up to Anglo-Saxon ideals? Well, that was pretty racist.

  “Oh, it’s a racist idea,” she said, “but it’s also an idea about cultural difference,” adding that after President Polk took over a portion of Mexico, the treaty of the annexation had a guarantee of citizenship in it—and there’s no question that Mexicans were not perceived as Anglo-Saxon. But by 1900 the USA had come up with more legal alternatives. Moreover, Ponsa said, “Part of the thinking wasn’t just that these people are d
ifferent and therefore inferior, but it also was, ‘This is a wholly developed foreign culture, and it really isn’t clear how well their cultural, legal, social, political traditions can mesh with ours.’” (The Downes v. Bidwell ruling made a distinction between “the annexation of distant and outlying possessions” and earlier expansion within “contiguous territory inhabited only by people of the same race or by scattered bodies of native Indians”—the Indians and their rights, it’s clear, were also of little concern to the court.)

  It was an issue of assimilation, one that called to mind not just present-day immigration debates but also the question of how, exactly, we define what it means to be American, and who gets to set that definition. As Professor Ponsa kept going, full speed ahead, my mind fixed on this question.

  I’d spent the hour before our call planning the next leg of my trip, to American Samoa, and the topic of cultural evolution, of colliding traditions, recurred throughout my guidebooks and historical research. The common theme was that even by the pluralistic standards of the USA, American Samoa was different, more foreign than familiar.

  OF ALL the territories, American Samoa was the one I could most clearly imagine—I’d seen it, or approximations of it, in tiki bars, in South Pacific, in Moby-Dick’s Queequeg, in Gaugin’s paintings of Tahiti. The Packaged Polynesia of jungles and bougainvillea and volcanoes, hulaing women in grass skirts and coconut bras, spear-wielding men, stone-totem gods—Eden with a dash of danger. I knew, on an intellectual level, that this was not reality but commodified exoticism. I’ve read Orientalism and The Image. I get it. But my Tourist Lizard Brain was hard to tune out. Let me have my South Seas Fantasy, it said. Gimme. It was all the more alluring since Maren was, indeed, coming along. After that beach photo she’d seen months earlier, and Sheldon’s radio shout-out, she wasn’t going to just get by on text messages and postcards. She wanted a piece of the fantasy, too.