Honolulu, Hawaii
October 1, 1969
A quick Pacific quiz:
Where did President Nixon goof politically in his trip around the world this summer?
Where is the next Waikiki in the Pacific Islands likely to develop?
Some students of world affairs and tourism may be surprised to find the answer to both questions is Guam, generally considered as a military outpost and one of Oceania’s less exotic ports of call.
Such old impressions are less untrue than incomplete. Certainly this territory of the U.S. has been neither richly endowed by nature nor treated kindly by history. But it does have two assets of political and economic as well as strategic importance — location and size.
Some 3, 000 miles out from Hawaii, Guam is the farthest west piece of real estate owned by the U.S. It is in the center of the prime area of American Pacific Island interest, surrounded by the separate Trust Territory.
Its total area of 206 square miles makes it smaller than Singapore or Hawaii’s Molokai, but it is the largest island above the equator between Hawaii and the Philippines.
Beauty can be found in the 30-mile length of this peanut-shaped land. Dramatic cliffs plunge to the sea. A few Spanish style villages still nestle in coves behind sparkling bays. Sun and billowing clouds make lovely patterns on undulating green uplands.
But much of the island is covered with military bases or a boring blanket of tangan tangan (haole koa in Hawaii), a scrubby tree that grows as thick as a hedge. Agana, the war-devastated capital, now has some attractive government buildings and small park areas. But Marine Drive, the business district which stretches for miles along the waterfront, is an unplanned disaster of alternating old and new stores, drive-ins, and filling stations. “We have the black top disease,” says an official expressing concern about the proliferation of unlandscaped parking lots in his car-oriented community.
The result is not always an attractive reflection of U.S. influence. However, it does point up the increasingly thick layer of Americanization that covers a society where touches of Spanish social and political influences remain — making for a little latinized Los Angeles at its worst.
History has changed both the landscape and the people of Guam fundamentally since Ferdinand Magellan and his starving crew chanced upon the island in 1521, making it the first Pacific Ocean area to experience contact with the West. In the next three centuries Spain came over with a mixture of sword, cross, disease, and culture to Guam and the other islands of the Marianas chain running north. The result was a Spanish territory where most of the original Chamorro people were killed off and the rest blended with Spanish, Filipino, and Mexican strains. Today this makes for a Guamanian (or Marianas islander) considerably different from other Micronesians in other groups.
The scene along Marine Drive
Guam, the onetime port of call for Spanish galleons carrying treasure between Manila and Mexico, was taken by the U.S. as a prize of the Spanish-American war in 1898. Short-sightedly, the rest of the Marianas (and Micronesia) were given to Germany, which surrendered them to Japan after World War I.
Indicative of the American strategic, rather than commercial, colonial philosophy towards Pacific Islands, the U.S. Navy administered Guam (Japanese wartime occupation excepted) from the turn of the century until 1950. Guamanian politicians still talk about the admiral who remarked that ruling Guam was no different from running a battleship. Some charge the level of democracy was about as high, but whatever the past, military influence and responsibility remain an important and delicate point in this time of increasing civilian government.
The President and Politics
Probably both unwittingly and unknowingly, President Nixon got involved in this situation in his late July stop. Guam was hardly a significant point on the agenda on his world tour. Even Guamanians realized their island was just a place for him to rest overnight between seeing the astronauts back from the moon and meeting Asian leaders. Still the President might have managed more than simple airport handshakes for his newly named Republican Governor, Carlos Comacho. He missed a chance to then name the new Territorial Secretary, the equivalent of Lt. Governor. The Guam GOP chairman didn’t even get in the airport receiving line. The President did have a meeting with top leaders of the nearby Trust Territory, which was important, but dramatized his seeming disinterest in Guam. He stayed with the Navy, underscoring the importance of the military.
Moylan
Comacho
Arriola
“That’s the last time we let the military take over plans like that,” said a leading Republican. “If they do, they can have it all. “ Democrats seemed content to contrast it with a previous visit of President Johnson when the then Governor, Democrat Manuel Guerrero, flew back to Honolulu with his wife, boarded Air Force One and arrived home arm in arm with a smiling President who announced Guerrero’s reappointment.
Few in Washington can be expected to worry about such minor breaches: the people of this unincorporated territory don’t even vote for President, although they are proud U.S. citizens. They have no power in Congress, only an unofficial “Delegate” who is an elected lobbyist in the capital.
But there is local political significance in that Guam for the first time will elect its governor in 1970, and Comacho and the Republicans need all the help they might get. Guam right now is pretty much Democratic country; the Democrats have all 21 seats in the local unicameral Legislature and most of the village offices. They have also been organized since 1960 and before that were known as the Popular Party. In contrast, the Republican Party just won recognition at last year’s national convention in Miami Beach.
Surfers play behind monument where Magellan landed
Although the Nixon Administration got to name the last appointed governor for a 16-month interval, Democrats talk confidently of victory in 1970. “Unless something scandalous happens, Guam will be entirely Democratic next election, says House Speaker Jaoquin Arriola. He is one of three Democratic candidates for governor, along with former Governor Manuel Guerrero (considered the man to beat) and. Ricardo Bordallo, another member of the Legislature. “We Democrats may fight like hell in the primary, “ says Arriola, “but when that’s over we get together like brothers. “
Among the public doubters about that is Governor Comacho, an amiable U.S.-trained dentist who served a term with the now-defunct Territorial Party in 1964 and was a key figure in forming the GOP two years ago. Conceding an uphill battle, he bases Republican hopes on a damaging Democratic split and establishing a GOP image of good government with a fresh appeal for youth. Part of the youthful look may come from the new Territorial Secretary, 30-year-old Kurt Moylan, cigar-smoking son of a local business family who comes across as energetic, impulsive, inexperienced, and personable. Moylan is not a native Guamanian but a Hawaiian -Chinese -Irish mixture who came to Guam with his family from Honolulu in 1950. He is a cousin of Hawaii entertainer Don Ho.
Whether the Republicans can build much strength in a year is uncertain, but there are elements of change in the Guam political situation. One of them is the growing influence of “Statesiders, “ American civilians who have come to Guam in various business ventures. More important now is the rising political importance of Guam’s Filipino population, now about one-fifth of the 80,000 population and rising as more arrive weekly under liberalized U.S. immigration laws. Guamanian attitudes towards Filipinos are ambivalent: there are blood and cultural ties and more workers are needed in the defense and tourist oriented economy, but newcomers are looked down upon socially and regarded with some concern politically. “Filipinos are starting to pose a problem in the structure of things, “ says one political leader. “There are now maybe 3,500 Filipino-American voters here and the number is growing. That’s enough to be a swing vote if either party gets most of them. “
A Military-Tourism Economy
Military-civilian relations on Guam have come a long way since the like-a-battleship era. Still the very size and nature of the military makes for continuing importance and problems. Servicemen and dependents make up a third of the total population. Navy and Air Force bases occupy large areas, and more is being sought, including some sites that may be important for tourism. The Navy even still provides most of the utilities, although efforts are underway to establish a civilian power authority. By varying estimates military and defense-related spending makes up between 60 and 80 per cent of the economy.
It’s no wonder many still see Guam as big military bases with a civilian island attached rather than vice versa. But the island is evolving from being a strictly company town for the military. Tourism is the major reason.
With an international airport and central ocean location, Guam was long a refueling stop for American travelers on the way to more appealing spots in Asia, sort of a Pacific Peoria without South Sea island appeal. Five years ago, there were 30 hotel rooms serving less than 2,000 visitors (leaving aside military personnel and their dependents.) Now it’s estimated that upwards of 40,000 visitors will occupy over 800 Guam hotel rooms by the end of this year. That’s tourism on Tahiti’s scale. The key point here is that more than 80 per cent of those visitors will be from Japan. Credit for stressing the Japan market is generally given to Rex Wills II, a onetime Hawaii Visitors Bureau staff member who was executive secretary of the Guam Tourist Commission from late 1963 until this August. Pan American Airways opened the Tokyo Guam route in May of 1967 on a twice-a-week basis, and it proved so popular that there is now daily jet service on the 1,500 mile run. Many Japanese visitors are honeymooners; in fact, 50 such couples arrived on one flight.
Wills, now back in Hawaii, says Guam’s attractions for Japanese include a chance to escape to tropical sun, sand, and sea in the chill winter, a duty-free port where some Japanese products are cheaper than in Tokyo, and the cheapest way to visit a U.S. area — young Japanese can afford the $139 round trip to Guam where coming to Hawaii costs over twice as much.
Japanese visiting World War II battle and cemetery areas have been among the tourists, but that is a relatively minor factor, in the same way a Pearl Harbor tour is in Hawaii tourism. The major point cited by Willis is that the Western Pacific islands, especially Micronesia, can serve as prospering Japan’s Caribbean. Thus Guam is viewed as a small Pacific Puerto Rico (ideas for gambling casinos are even being revived), a major urban tourism center sending off visitor groups to sample the more languid and primitive charms of Micronesia’s many islands. Already about one-quarter of the Japanese visitors go to the Trust Territory, mostly to Saipan which now has the only first-class hotel in the area.
With TWA now arriving daily from Okinawa and Honolulu and Continental’s Air Micronesia island hopping in the same directions, Guam’s offbeat tourist boom seems bound to continue. Enough airlines and U.S. and Japanese hotel companies think so to make Guam’s Tumon Bay, close to both Agana and the airport, a budding Waikiki. A half-dozen resort hotels are either up, planned, or being discussed for this pleasant if unspectacular strip of sand and shallow bay. Guamanian officials talk about avoiding the lack of sound planning and other mistakes made at Hawaii’s Waikiki. But one tourism expert close to the Guam situation says, “Sadly, it has the potential to be honky tonkish. In growing so fast a situation has again gotten out of hand. “
Where’s Guam Going?
If Guam is growing, there still remain questions about where it is going in the bigger Pacific picture. Politically, its people want closer ties with the U.S. Predictions are the elected governor will be followed by legislation for an official Delegate to Congress and the right to vote for the American President. Virtually all leaders talk about eventual U.S. statehood. But there are differences about how that will be approached. Some foresee a period of higher status as a commonwealth while Guam’s economy develops and political relations with the surrounding Micronesian Trust Territory are worked out. Guam leaders take for granted their island’s integration soon with the ethnically related northern Marianas district of the Trust Territory; they say other unions are possible. Assuming Trust Territory Micronesians opt for close U. S. relations, some form of union with Guam such as a loose federation seems logical. But that does not mean it will happen.
Poor in natural wealth but fed with outside military and tourism money, Guam can continue to survive and even prosper pretty much alone, as it has in recent years. Whether it has a bigger destiny in the Pacific is yet uncertain. It is the biggest and, in per capita dollars, the richest island in the area. It has the potential to be a much bigger commercial and educational center than it is.
But as the Latinized, Catholic Philippines often seems set apart in Asia, so Guam and the Marianas with their Spanish-American heritage and racial makeup appear different in the Pacific Islands picture. On another level, other islanders may envy Guam’s $1.70 an hour minimum wage and new cars, but some are even more wary of its two industries, a big dose of the U.S. military and big booming tourism.
“Guamanians may look down on the rest of us; you can sometimes feel it, “ said one Trust Territory Micronesian. “But that does not mean we look up to them. Politically and economically they have come along, but what you see there in terms of culture and materialism is not a compliment to the American system. “
In truth, Guam does not represent the total American system but rather the U.S. emphasis on strategic and material matters. Moreover, it has many talented and charming people, some of whom care about a broader future. The University of Guam has potential. Some businesses based there are looking to a bigger role in the area.
“Guam is good,” the self -reassuring slogan on sweatshirts says. Many who’ live there do find it a happy place with warm people. One can see the idea of a limited Pacific Puerto Rico. But another slogan pictures Guam as the “Crossroads of the Pacific” (along with how many other places?). That so far is only on ashtrays and black velvet pillows sold to tourists.
Received in New York on October 20, 1969.
Mr. John Griffin is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Honolulu Advertiser, Honolulu, Hawaii. This article may be published with credit to Mr. Griffin, the Honolulu Advertiser, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
