Destiny's Landfall: A History of Guam, Revised Edition

CHAPTER 8. Ordered Tranquility: 1903–1918

120 American Outpost From February 6, 1903, until December 10, 1941, Seaton Schroeder was followed by over two dozen sometimes capable and sometimes obtuse American naval officers as governors and acting governors of Guam. These naval chief executives usually served short tours of duty, averaging only one year and five months each on Guam. Tours for American officers and enlisted men were deliberately kept short because of the unhealthy climate and poor living conditions on Guam in those days before air-conditioning . Officers received 10 percent additional salary and enlisted men 20 percent more as hardship pay for service on the island. The short tours of American governors contrasted with the longer tenures of the sixty-three Spanish chief executives after Father San Vitores. The Spaniards had averaged three and a half years each on Guam. As a consequence of their short tenures, American governors rarely became knowledgeable about local conditions or the island people. These men all held midlevel ranks, and thus for most of them Guam was only a brief, somewhat exotic step on a career ladder to higher rank. For the people of the island, the naval and marine officers and their wives seemed mostly a blur of tall, red-faced men in starched white uniforms and delicately complected women in full-skirted dresses and wide-brimmed hats. In the early 1900s, the daily life of the Cha­ mor­ ros still revolved around three basic elements: the extended family, the church, and a subsistence economy based on farming family-owned lanchos and on some fishing. Every Monday morning there was a migration of whole families of Cha­ mor­ ros out of Agana and the villages to lanchos, some for a day or so, some for a week. Attachment to the land remained the bedrock of Cha­ mor­ ro commerce and family wealth. There were as yet few metal plows; planting was done mostly by hand. Everyone returned at the weekend to their villages for church services, socializing, and cockfights. An American journalist visiting in 1905 called Guam “a lump of oriental loveliness” and described the average Cha­ mor­ro as “less than a child, obstinately gentle, full of caprice...apparently wealthy, utterly poor.” A German expatriate and longtime Guam resident, Hermann Costenoble, wrote of the people of Guam, “As a matter of fact, everything that calls itself Cha­ mor­ ro has a wide and generous heart when approached by love.” A striking aspect of U.S. Navy rule on Guam the first decade was how little different it was for ordinary Cha­ mor­ ros from the previous Spanish military rule, other than the imposition of the English language and new governmental procedures, and the welcome elimination of polo labor. Technology , however, was changing rapidly in the 1900s, CHAPTER 8 Ordered Tranquility 1903–1918 Ordered Tranquility 1903–1918 121 linking Guam closer to the United States and to the outside world. Under Schroeder’s successor, Commander William E. Sewell, Guam was connected by an undersea commercial telegraph cable to Manila in June 1903 and with Midway, Honolulu, and San Francisco a month later. This linkage completed the encirclement of the globe by cable, with a key way station at Sumay village. One of Governor Sewell’s major acts was to formalize Guam’s judicial system and institute new land tax rates in 1903 to replace the old Spanish tax of 1 percent of assessed value. The new tax varied with the type of property and location but was higher in any case than 1 percent. The Cha­ mor­ ros at that time were “land rich but dollar poor,” and many did not have the cash to pay even this low property tax. The result was that, over the years, the naval government gradually acquired property through foreclosures for delinquent taxes, slowly alienating Cha­ mor­ ros from their land. Every year, “four to six titles, usually to poor land, reverted to the naval government,” wrote one observer. Japanese migrants began to buy the choicest crop lands, which had the highest taxes, from the Cha­ mor­ ros. Cha­ mor­ ro family hulling rice, early 1900s. Rice was grown on Guam from precontact times until the end of World War II when large-scale cultivation ceased along with copra production. (From the collection of the Micronesian Area Research Center, Mangilao, Guam) 122 Chapter 8 The need to improve Apra Harbor was dramatically demonstrated in March 1904, when the cableship...