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

CHAPTER 13. Under the Organic Act: 1950–1970

206 Partial Decolonization The first few years after passage of the Organic Act produced an intense but progressive governmental transformation on Guam. Prior to the act, the navy administered Guam as a military base with the island’s civil government of minor priority within the military chain of command in the Pacific under CINCPAC in Hawai‘i. After the act, the island government’s responsibilities expanded with direct civilian links to the Congress and to the executive branch, even though in size, people, and resources Guam is analogous (albeit with unique differences as a territory rather than a subdivision of a larger entity such as a state) to a small, semi-rural county or municipality in the overall U.S. system. Governor Skinner, who worked under the navy until the Organic Act passed Congress, found himself reappointed all over again in 1950 under the Interior Department. Skinner’s administration and the Guam legislature wrote new local laws that included an Election Code, a Civil Service Code, a civilian retirement system, building and land laws, a tax law, and other statutes that reshaped Guam into a modern civilian government for the first time. He replaced all military personnel in the government with civilians, predominantly Guamanians, under new wage scales and a merit system for the 1,728 classified civil service positions. The navy removed itself from banking by selling the Bank of Guam to the Bank of America in 1950. The U.S. selective service system was applied to Guam in 1951, and young Guamanians enlisted eagerly in the armed forces, easily filling Guam’s annual quotas for the Korean War. Civilian policemen and firemen, now nearly all Guamanians, ensured law and order without any further involvement of the U.S. Marines. In 1950, Skinner separated the civilian hospital at Oka, still in its two rusty Butler buildings, from the Naval Hospital and named it the Guam Memorial Hospital (GMH). For civilian medical personnel , Skinner sent recruiters to the Philippines to hire physicians and nurses on contract. Those hired were accorded American credentials after examinations but received salaries lower than U.S. standards. After fulfilling their contracts, many of these Filipino professionals remained on Guam, becoming U.S. citizens and forming an important segment of the island’s private medical community. Research started on the local disease lytico-bodig after naval pathologists found a continuing high incidence of deaths among Cha­ mor­ ros from what the Americans still thought, as before the war, to be ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), which is fairly rare (about two new cases per 100,000 people) in the CHAPTER 13 Under the Organic Act 1950–1970 Governor Carlton S. Skinner, 1950. Appointed by President Harry Truman, Skinner was the first civilian governor of Guam after nearly three centuries of rule by military governors since the death of Father San Vitores. Governor Skinner helped draft the Guam Organic Act, and he instituted many lasting reforms to demilitarize Guam’s government during his tenure, 1950–1953. He is shown here on the Old Spanish Bridge in Agana. (Courtesy of Governor Skinner and the MacDuff Press, San Francisco) 208 Chapter 13 United States. After the war, doctors discovered that lytico-bodig was not rare on Guam and that in some aspects it differs from ALS. The naval physicians renamed the bodig aspect of the disease, in which the spinal cord and brain are attacked, parkinsonism-dementia complex. In ALS, the lytico aspect, a sound brain is imprisoned in a paralyzed body. The relation between the two aspects is unclear. Umatac was long the center of the illness, as it had been in Spanish times, so it seemed that it might be hereditary, but it turned out not to be. Some researchers suspected consumption of fadang, the cycad federico seeds, which had increased among Cha­ mor­ ros in the war years, to be the cause of the disease, as Spanish governor Felipe de la Corte had warned back in 1865. Research on this “Guam riddle” has continued ever since, primarily on-island by neurologists K-M.Chen and John Steele. The causes and the cure of lytico-bodig have yet to be established, but incidences of the disease have gradually decreased for unknown reasons. Meanwhile, Governor Skinner expanded the Guam public school system and revised the curriculum to stateside standards. Classes continued to be in English as before the war, but the Cha­ mor­ ro language was...