The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  Importantly, it wasn’t just Hearst and Pulitzer denouncing Spain, but also more high-minded publications like Harper’s and the Atlantic. The latter ran a story titled “The Decadence of Spain,” with tales of corruption and general high-living excess on the part of the monarchy and the Catholic Church: “To a greater or less degree, all Spanish colonies were fields in which clericalism rioted at will.” Other Atlantic stories included jabs that the Spanish embodied both “Christian obscurantism and . . . Oriental incuriousness” and were innately “self-centered” and “warlike.”

  To be sure, the Spanish had a lot to answer for. On Guam, some of the earliest missionaries had offered the Chamorros a choice: convert to Christianity or be killed. The ultimatum led to a slow-burning war that lasted for twenty-six years, from 1672 to 1698; just over a hundred Spanish were killed in the fighting, and more than a thousand Chamorros. Add to that “deprivation, diseases, disease-induced infertility, societal demoralization,” Rogers says, and “the Spanish colonial system as a whole, including the church as well as the military, was responsible for the decimation of the very people it sought to save.” Similar events unfolded in Spain’s other colonies, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, all of which the United States was eyeing as the clamor for war—and, implicitly and explicitly, overseas expansion—grew in the late 1890s.

  The United States aided the Cuban rebels, including sending the battleship USS Maine into Havana Harbor in January 1898. On February 15, 1898, the Maine blew up. The cause is still unknown and widely debated to this day. Was it an accident? Intentionally set off by Americans as a pretext for war? Hearst and Pulitzer splashed it on their front pages. “DESTRUCTION OF THE WAR SHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF AN ENEMY,” declared the Journal, offering a $50,000 reward “for the detection of the perpetrator of the Maine outrage!” Teddy Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, proclaimed it “an act of dirty treachery.” Soon, the national rallying cry was, “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” A few months of posturing ensued before the Spanish declared war on April 23, after the U.S. Navy set up a blockade of Cuba.

  News was slow to reach Guam. Very slow. The mail had come from Manila on April 9 with nothing of note, and more than two months passed without any more information about goings-on in the world, until June 20, 1898, when four unfamiliar ships appeared on the horizon. They were American military vessels under the command of Captain Henry Glass, a Union veteran who, with his hard stare and thick mustache, could have passed for Roosevelt’s brother. He was eager to get to the Philippines, which he regarded as the real action in the war, but had orders to “capture the port of Guam . . . in one or two days” on the way.

  As the ships rounded Orote Peninsula on the island’s west side, the cruiser USS Charleston fired several shells at Fort Santa Cruz, yielding no return fire, because the fort had long been abandoned. So Glass steamed on toward the harbor, where everyone had heard the blasts but assumed that these ships, whoever they were, had been firing a ceremonial salute. Ever hospitable, the locals reciprocated the greeting with “little antique brass cannons” and local health and customs officials dutifully rowed out to greet the Charleston, at which point Captain Glass harrumphed words that are lost to history but were presumably to the effect of, Did you not hear? There’s a war on.

  The following day, after a flurry of letters between Glass and Governor Juan Marina, the latter surrendered Guam to the Americans, and Glass steamed on to the Philippines. The rest of the war went quickly, with a decisive American victory, led by Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, at the Battle of San Juan Hill, on July 1. A peace protocol between the United States and Spain was signed on August 12. Fighting across the various theaters, in the Pacific and the Caribbean, had lasted less than four months. American Secretary of State John Hay called it “a splendid little war.”

  On December 10, 1898, the two nations signed the Treaty of Paris, with Spain selling the Philippines to the United States for $20 million, ceding Puerto Rico and Guam outright, and giving up control of Cuba (which the United States would officially control until granting the nation independence in 1902). The American poet Carl Sandburg, who had fought in Puerto Rico, attended a banquet in Paris, at which Americans toasted their homeland:

  The first one [said], “Here’s to the United States, bounded on the north by Canada, on the south by Mexico, on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by the Pacific.” The second speaker: “In view of what President McKinley has termed manifest destiny and in consideration of the vast new responsibilities that loom before our country, I offer the toast: To the United States, bounded on the north by the North Pole, on the south by the South Pole, on the east by the rising sun, on the west by the setting sun.” The third speaker: “With all due humility in view of the staggering tasks our country faces in the future, I would offer the toast: To the United States, bounded on the north by the Aurora Borealis, on the south by the Precession of the Equinoxes, on the east by Primeval Chaos, on the west by the Day of Judgment.”

  Sandburg’s kicker: “It was a small war edging toward immense consequences.”

  BY THE TIME of the Spanish-American War, many markers of Chamorro culture of the pre-Magellan variety had been erased or altered beyond recognition. To see a traditional village (or an approximation of it, anyway) these days, you have to settle for a ticketed tourist attraction at the edge of Tumon. The day I went, a young man in a loincloth showed me around thatch-roof houses—here’s where the chief lived, here’s the school—and demonstrated how to open a coconut, before pointing me toward a display of local animals. The enclosure for the brown tree snake, I noted, was empty, which I pointed out with mild alarm, glancing around the overhanging branches, remembering the story I’d read months earlier about the plan to combat the snakes with Tylenol-laced dead mice. “Yeah, ours died,” my guide said with a shrug. “We haven’t found a new one yet. Everyone thinks they’re, like, everywhere, but it’s actually pretty rare that you see them.” He added, “Okay, that’s the end of the tour,” and informed me that my ticket would get me a deal on drinks at the bar next door.

  But after a few days spent gaping at the attractions and malls around Tumon, eating copious amounts of barbecue, and generally enjoying the cross-cultural people-watching (“Check out those Russians haggling over that Guam, USA, coffee mug with that Japanese shopkeeper!”), I started to feel restless, the high of Tourism Overload slowly wearing off.

  I left Tumon and drove south. The buildings were lower and a bit shabbier, the highways lined with familiar chain stores and strip malls with coffee shops and storefront churches and dive bars. The terrain rolled gently with subdivisions and scrubby, wide-open fields and swaths of jungle. Every now and then I came across an old Spanish bridge or church, but the general impression was postwar Americana, modest yet aspirational, The Brady Brunch with a hint of The Jetsons. Small white ranch houses with some minor modernist grace note, like a rounded corner. A Citibank with a blue roof like a geodesic dome. Even the monument in Plaza de España marking Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1981 felt like it dated to thirty years earlier, sinuous and white and rocket-like, like something off of Eero Saarinen’s drafting table.

  There was one recurring design motif, a stubby mushroom-looking shape that appeared in bus shelters, on political signs and corporate logos, even on the façade of the world’s largest Kmart, which stands near the airport and where I went to buy a new hat to replace the one claimed by the aitu of American Samoa.* It was the same shape I’d seen on Maren’s Guam quarter: Lattes (or latte stones), pronounced “lottie” or “laddie.” The traditional versions were made of basalt or limestone: a pillar (haligi) and a stubby capstone (tasa), the whole thing four to seven feet tall. From about 1,000 BC until Spanish colonization, they were literally the foundation of Chamorro culture, with key village structures built atop six or eight lattes. They were found only in Micronesia and have become the symbol of Guam.

  Just south of Hagåtña, the c
ommercial center, was the Latte of Freedom, which stands eighty feet tall. It is Guam’s version of that American standby, the roadside attraction, albeit one with a deeper cultural significance than, say, New Jersey’s Lucy the Elephant or Minnesota’s World’s Largest Ball of Twine Rolled by One Man. I snapped a handful of photos, carefully framing them to make it seem even larger and kitschier than it was—admitting to myself that maybe I wasn’t done with being a clichéd tourist quite yet—before buying a ticket to enter. Inside the spacious tasa-cum-observation deck, a plaque explained that the structure opened in 2010, as a symbol of “the endurance of the belief that freedom is the indestructible and unquenchable desire of all people. The Latte of Freedom like the Statue of Liberty in the East . . . [stands] boldly as America’s Western gatepost from Asia and the Pacific Rim.”

  For the United States, Guam, like all the other places the nation claimed or bought in its expansion efforts, was initially an advertisement to the world: Look what we can do. We’re an empire now, too! But the Latte of Freedom, even as it celebrated Chamorro culture, also presented an updated view of the territories: they are living showcases of the American Experience.

  IN MY VISITS to the USVI and American Samoa, I’d been intrigued by the long-ago battles and the ongoing political posturing, but largely compartmentalized these tales as one-off anecdotes, without fully understanding how they fit into the recurring themes of American territorial history. But when I started to read about Guam after the American takeover, there were so many parallels to what I’d heard before that the broader trends were suddenly obvious.

  The pros: improvements to basic infrastructure, schools, and public health. The Navy built an ice plant and brought electricity and telephones. The earliest U.S. Census of Guam, in 1901, counted 9,630 Chamorros; by 1920, this population had increased 70 percent. The cons: a hefty amount of racism, efforts to change or forbid fundamental elements of the local culture, and efforts to prevent the territory from gaining political power. Guam’s 1905 Annual Report of the Governor said:

  The location of Guam [makes] it of great and recognized strategic value to the U.S., as a point to be occupied and held for naval purposes alone. It has neither present nor prospective economic value and should not, then, excite the interest of other than scientific or military men.

  Until the Guam Organic Act of 1950, Guamanians (the catchall term for people who live there, regardless of ethnicity) were nationals, not citizens, because the naval government was “of the opinion that the enactment of [citizenship] would be prejudicial to the best interests of both the United States and the native population of Guam.” (In 1947, a congressional committee report stated that “the people of both Guam and American Samoa are entitled to full American citizenship and should be made citizens at the earliest possible date by Congress.” The report later added, in direct answer to the strong lobbying from Guam, “In our opinion citizenship is long overdue and should be granted forthwith. Indeed, an apology is due the Guamanians for the long delay. . . .”)

  The Navy forbade the speaking of Chamorro in public places and—because the early governors were strict Protestants—dismantled the power of the Catholic Church, including sending every Spanish priest to Manila. The overall situation was bad enough that in 1901, thirty-two Chamorros petitioned Washington to end naval rule and establish a civilian government because, “It is not an exaggeration to say that fewer permanent guarantees of liberty and property rights exist now than under Spanish domain.” At various points, governors outlawed smoking, drinking, and even whistling. Naval Governor William Gilmer, who took office in 1918, tried to ban interracial marriage, which was met with such protest that it led to his removal from office in 1920.†

  The thing about secondhand colonies is that taking them over by force requires a two-step chain of logic. First: The current colonizers are evil and oppressing the natives. And second: But the natives are a fundamentally inferior race, incapable of ruling themselves. This place should remain a colony, just with a new ruler: us. It was a double whammy of racism, based specifically on the same belief in white Anglo-Saxon Protestant exceptionalism that guided the Insular Cases. “The American flag has not been planted in foreign soil to acquire more territory but for humanity’s sake,” William McKinley said on the campaign trail in 1900.

  IN 1917, Guam was thrust into another war, and again its role was that of an offbeat footnote: this was where the first American shots of World War I were fired. The German naval ship SMS Cormoran had been interned at Apra Harbor since coming in to refuel in August 1914, just a few weeks after the war started in Europe, at a time when the United States was still officially neutral but diplomatic relations with Germany were already strained. The ship and its crew remained in port without incident until the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917 (on Guam, it was already April 7), and the small U.S. naval force on Guam fired two shots across the bow of the Cormoran as they attempted to seize it. The captain agreed to surrender the men but not the vessel, and in short order the Germans set off explosives to sink the Cormoran. Seven crew members drowned as they swam to shore; the other three hundred fifty or so survived and were taken prisoners of war.

  After World War I, life continued apace on Guam, with continuing Americanization, but the neighborhood was changing. Guam is the southernmost of the fifteen islands in the Mariana archipelago, the rest of which had been controlled by Germany prior to the war, but were ceded after the conflict to Japan—a new empire on the rise.

  By the 1930s, Japan’s aspirations and expansion efforts were starting to make the rest of the world nervous. Their version of manifest destiny was the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” spreading across East Asia and the islands of Micronesia. Japan transformed Guam’s Mariana Islands neighbors Saipan, Rota, and Tinian into bustling agricultural hubs and military bases, and invaded mineral-rich Manchuria, prompting a League of Nations reprimand in 1933. In response, the Japanese delegates walked out in a statement-making huff. As tensions grew through the rest of the decade, Japan knew that the small Pacific islands, spread across thousands of miles of ocean, formed a strategic chain. To win a war would require claiming nearly every link. This time, Guam would not be a mere footnote.

  On Guam there were resources, there were harbors for naval fleets, there were the strips of land for runways. In an update of Alfred Mahan’s empire-building guidance, Japanese Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito observed, “There is no hope of victory in places where we do not have control of the air.”

  Guam was a critical gap in Japan’s chain and a nexus for American naval communications and airplane refueling. On December 8, 1941, hours after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers based on nearby Saipan began air raids on Guam. The next day, a fleet of Japanese Navy vessels arrived with nearly 6,000 troops, easily overwhelming the U.S. forces, which consisted of some 125 Marines and a Chamorro Insular Guard of 84. Naval Governor George McMillin surrendered the island. Guam and the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska were the only parts of the United States to fall to Axis control during World War II.

  AS I DROVE around the southern end of the island, I spotted a sign reading TALOFOFO FALLS PARK/YOKOI’S CAVE, which I’d heard was a particularly notable tourist trap. I couldn’t resist.

  I took a hard right onto a bumpy road that led into the jungle, and then to a broad parking lot in front of a long shed-like building with a faux-castle façade. It was a broiler of a day, and the instant I emerged from the air-conditioned bubble of the car, my skin cells resigned themselves to melanoma.

  I bought a ticket and entered the grounds, greeted by a handful of amusement-park attractions, including bumper cars and spinning teacups, none of them in use, advertised with hand-painted cartoon characters that may or may not have violated certain Disney trademarks. There were only two or three other people around, plus a couple of wild pigs poking around in the bushes.

  I walked on to a shaded area with a fenced-in garden. Through the vege
tation, I caught a fleeting, veiled glimpse of some sculptures, and it looked like an area of tranquillity and repose. The sign on the gate read:

  ATTENTION

  Only 19 yrs. and Older

  May Enter the Love Land

  Hold on, I thought. Is this . . .

  My question trailed off as I saw the first sculpture, a man about to drop his trousers. The next was a woman pulling down her top. I followed the path and one at a time, from behind each tree or bush, the statues revealed themselves—in every possible way. There were twenty or thirty statues in all, doing things to themselves, with others, and in threesomes, often performing sexual contortions that defied all laws of physics and real-life possibilities of anatomy. Some of the statues had bulldog heads. I’ve never seen a more compelling ad for abstinence.

  But as they added up, they became less droll and more wearying in their efforts to enthrall and titillate. The next stop was the Ghost House, and after a couple of minutes with its motion-activated lurching mannequins, fake blood, and creepy sound effects, I’d had enough. This time, I didn’t even have any snarky comments to make, and I thought, finally, All right, I’ve reached my limit for quirk and kitsch—for real this time.

  I could feel my energy draining away in the midday heat as I boarded a gondola and rode over a waterfall and down into a small valley, where hand-painted signs pointed to a museum that told the story of Guam. There were a few rooms of dioramas, a half step more lifelike than the Ghost House, depicting Chamorro settlement and Spanish conquest and World War II. One showed a Japanese soldier, gaunt and shirtless and alone in the jungle, one Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi.

  Japan’s occupation of Guam lasted until August 1944, when American troops came back in full force and reclaimed the island. As the fighting wound down, thousands of Japanese soldiers fled into the jungle, among them Yokoi. A piece of paper taped to the glass told his story: