Present control of territory by the United States Navy for military purposes, as was instituted by Admiral Nimitz in the Marshall Islands on January 31, 19441, is in principle no novelty. It is parallel to the work of the Navy on the Dalmatian Coast after the World War2 and in California during the Mexican War,3 and, though some formalities may have been lacking, to the control of the Marquesas Islands by Commodore Porter in 1813-14,4 to the surveillance over Liberia and slave-trading areas of Africa before the Civil War5, to the brief occupations—before their transfer to the Army—of Forts Hatteras and Clark and of Port Royal in the Civil War. Commodore Perry, on his way to Japan, recalled his own experience in military government, already considerable:
In my former commands upon the coast of Africa and in the Gulf of Mexico, where it fell to my lot to subjugate many towns and communities, I found no difficulty in conciliating the good will and confidence of the conquered people, by administering the unrestricted power I held rather to their comfort and protection than to their annoyance. ...6
Perry’s proposal for American bases in the Luchu Islands7 might have entailed the tasks of military government—and perhaps, if thoroughly followed, eliminated the need for some of the military government which is the Navy’s present and prospective task.
According to most precedents affecting continental areas, the Navy’s administrative task in the Marshalls need not be prolonged much beyond the time of military operations there. But the fact that naval officers served for many years after wartime as governors of Guam, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands suggests that present responsibilities may not end with the war.
Other powers have made more use of naval officers and of their navy departments in colonial government than we have. The Portuguese, whose official expeditions carried their flag to Africa and to India, naturally governed all their colonies through the Ministry of Marine8 (until 1911). The English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries governed Newfoundland indirectly through naval authority,9 and the Admiralty, as other departments of government, had a share in colonial administration generally.10 The French governed their colonies through the Ministry of Marine, with some interruptions, until 1893.11
While naval control eventually gave way to other forms in these instances, it was no accidental makeshift. The Portuguese colonies originally were essentially overseas trading stations, which the Portuguese Navy enabled the homeland to retain and to monopolize. Newfoundland had no permanent population in early years, and the early settlements were too small to justify the expense of ordinary civil government;12 furthermore, Newfoundland was of direct concern to the Royal Navy, not only because the annual fishing fleets had to be protected and kept in order, but because it served as a training school for English seamen.13 But for the classic laxity of early English colonial government and for the fact that the sea- minded English civilian colonial proprietor sometimes developed his own forms of sea power (the East India Company constructing ships of the line superior in many respects to those of the Royal Navy), the Navy’s responsibilities might have been greater. French colonization was a more truly royal enterprise; that and the weakness of the native maritime tradition itself naturally turned colonial responsibilities to the Ministry of Marine.
For equally adequate reasons naval administration of the Carolines, Marshalls, Marianas, and other groups may be continued after the end of present hostilities. Few if any have disagreed with President Roosevelt’s statement (September 17, 1943) that the United Nations will never again let Japan have authority over them14, and a public opinion poll has recorded American readiness to assume the responsibility.15 Even if some condominium or international trusteeship should be worked out ultimately, there is a general assumption that final territorial settlements and terms of peace will not be made immediately on the defeat of Germany and Japan. In the interval between surrender and settlement a continuation of wartime administrative responsibilities, assuming that they have been borne to reasonable satisfaction, would be natural. Thus the Japanese governed the former German islands north of the Equator through the Navy from 1914 to 1922, when, according to the Japanese report to the League of Nations, military forces were completely withdrawn.16 Afterward, if the United States is to continue to be the preponderant naval power in the Pacific, military expediency may demand American naval control of those natural appurtenances of sea power, whether under unqualified American sovereignty or under international authority.17
The United States (since 1873) has governed the continental territories through the Department of the Interior, whose concerns with public lands and Indians reflected the major interests of the nation in those areas; by much more inescapable logic, areas in which the national interest is purely naval would naturally fall under naval administration. That was true of Guam and of American Samoa, even when largely neutralized by foreign holdings and by a national policy inimical to their anticipated utilization along naval lines. Military uses of island territories demand not only precautions by the civil authorities for reasons of security, but the fostering of self-sufficiency in food. Further, if extensive naval establishments are to be made, as they are being made already, considerations of economy and administrative simplicity may suggest giving the Navy the tasks of civil government, instead of setting up separate and in many cases parallel services. The British experience in the West Indies has demonstrated the costliness of island governments modeled too closely on homeland systems,18 even where populations educated for self-government (and certainly not suspect of disloyalty) are involved. In the hearings on the government of Guam in 1937, senators were impressed by the contrast between the $35,000 spent for the civil government of Guam (population 22,290 in 1940) under naval control and the more than $1,000,000 spent for the government of the Virgin Islands (population 24,889 in 1940) under the Department of the Interior.19
Objections to naval control may include the charge that naval personnel has been selected and trained for service other than civil government.20 “I realized,” wrote Captain Seaton Schroeder of his service as governor of Guam (1900-1901), “that any great length of time passed in such circumstances by a Naval Officer must be a period of professional stagnation. A moderate amount of duty of that kind can do no harm . . . ,”21 Schroeder’s predecessor, Captain Richard P. Leary, assigned the duties of the governorship to a lieutenant (incidentally one of the ablest of all American colonial administrators), telling him “to use my own discretion and to call on him only in emergencies. As he does not understand Spanish he does not wish to be annoyed by accounts and documents in that language . . . .”22 Still Schroeder had asked for service in Guam,23 and in his knowledge of Spanish24 he was better fitted for his assignment than most American governors of Puerto Rico and of the Philippines have been for theirs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was the first American governor of Puerto Rico who could dispense with the services of an interpreter.25 One might expect to find fewer political and more expert appointments in the Division of Territories and Island Possessions, established in the Department of the Interior in 1934, but the Director of the Division reported in 1941 that no one in the Puerto Rican section in Washington knew Spanish or anything of Puerto Rico.26 Only the following year the Navy opened its School of Military Government and Administration at Columbia University, where officers already well qualified for service are studying for periods three times the length of the Army’s civil affairs training program for service in Europe,27 and along lines much broader than the traditional lines of the famous British colonial service.28 It does not follow that officers in colonial service before 1942, in the absence of formal training, made no preparation, though it is not possible to say how many, like Governor R. E. Coontz of Guam (later Admiral and Chief of Naval Operations), consulted ex-governors and studied the official correspondence before assuming their duties.29
A common error in judgments on the problem of personnel is the assumption of a free and simple choice between entirely naval personnel and entirely civilian personnel in colonial government. Actually, in pre-war times, a surprisingly large amount of actual government in Guam and Samoa was carried on by civilians, chiefly natives, and the official reports and hearings suggest that more civilians might have been brought out from the States had competent persons been willing to come. “We wanted a new director of education,” testified a former governor of Samoa in 1928, “and we sent out radiograms to various educational institutions in the West.... Leland Stanford answered, saying they had a wonder; and we all thought it too good to be true, and it was.”30 On the other hand, in some phases of government where efficiency is reflected in measurable results, the fitness of regular naval personnel has been evident: the disease rate for American Samoa, for instance, contrasts impressively with rates for near-by island groups, including Western Samoa, which is under civilian control.31 Delegate V. S. K. Houston of Hawaii, who favored a change in status for Samoa, testified in 1928 that
Health is maintained down there now in such a way that I cannot conceive of a civil government which would depend upon its own ability to pay for the services to give them the same things;32
before the Samoan Commission in 1930 he suggested continuing to use a naval public works officer.33 Recent reports from the Marshalls indicate spectacular achievements by medical officers: whereas in a generation of Japanese control incidence of yaws, for instance, seems to have increased by over 50 per cent34 within several months of the first American landings of 1944 it had been nearly eliminated.35
A frequent pre-war criticism of naval authority was that naval officers are, because accustomed to discipline in the service, unlikely to respect civil rights. The Nation commented on the appointment of a new governor of the Virgin Islands in 1925:
It is impossible for any man to succeed as long as he comes as a representative of a war-making branch of our government and applies naval discipline to a people previously accustomed to a representative civil administration. How much longer are American citizens going to see all our traditions of democracy violated in our overseas possessions before they demand that Congress shall supersede naval autocracy in the Virgin Islands, Guam, and Samoa with civilian governments and a fair measure of popular rights?36
Such criticisms assume that the degree of democracy in the governments of Guam and Samoa depends primarily on whether the supervising department is the Navy Department or some other department, on whether the governor is a naval officer or a civilian, rather than on the traditions of the people and more immediately on the specifications made by the Congress. Many students of native societies in the Pacific have concluded that
The establishment of democracy at the end of the war would mean that control would be transferred from a foreign bureaucracy to the Western- educated minority in the towns. This would be self-government, but it would not be democratic government.37
However, the justly famous system of territorial government following on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was devised and applied by the Congress and not by the Department of State or the Department of the Interior, which could no more apply it to or withhold it from a square foot of Montana or Alaska than the Navy Department can apply it to or withhold it from Guam and Samoa.38 The Navy Department as early as 1905 recommended granting citizenship to inhabitants of Guam,39 but Congress failed to act; the Department recommended separating the duties of the secretary of native affairs and the American judge in Samoa—which would have involved gains in civil liberties—but the Bureau of the Budget disapproved the estimate for the necessary appropriation.40 The governments of Guam and Samoa are not naval governments, as opposed to civil governments; they are civil governments administered through the Navy Department, which assigns naval personnel to double duty. Within the civil status, government may be arbitrary or irregular by continental standards where Congress fails to provide the necessary framework or the necessary funds.41 Even so, comparison of the government of American Samoa, with its native legislative fono and its large native administrative personnel, with the first stage of territorial government in the Old Northwest, where American citizens had no vestige of popular government, is decidedly to the advantage of the former. Perhaps simply because they have been Americans, accustomed to civil governments in the states, most of the naval governors have served in the spirit of Captain Seaton Schroeder:
One guiding principle to which I adhered steadily was the supremacy of the civil authority and the subordination of the military. . . . While the title of the governor was “Naval Governor,” the administration was wholly civil in its methods.42
According to recent accounts of the American rule in the occupied Marshall Islands, naval control has already brought a partial restoration of self-government as it existed before the German occupation.43
The charge that naval control brings racial discrimination was made especially with reference to the Virgin Islands when they were governed through the Navy Department.44 That prejudice has existed in the service is as clear as the fact that it exists among civilians. An often-quoted general order issued by Captain Richard P. Leary, first American governor of Guam (1899- 1900), reveals both the problem and some of its limits:
Attention is hereby called to the fact that the natives of Guam are not “damned dagoes,” nor “niggers,” but that they are law abiding, respectful human beings . . . who are as much entitled to courtesy, respect, and protection of life and liberty ... as are the best citizens of . . . any . . . home city.45
It may be a long time before the Navy Department (or the Department of the Interior) sends out a man like the famous Felix Eboue, first Negro to become governor- general of a French colony,46 but Eboue’s career was a product of French society in general as well as of the French colonial system. If a system can break down barriers to understanding among different peoples, the Navy’s system of sending officers to classes in anthropology, sociology, history, government, and languages bears bright promise.
Few would have imagined in the early thirties, when the Virgin Islands passed from a naval officer-governor to a civilian governor, when Puerto Rico passed from the War Department to a new Division of Territories and Island Possessions in the Department of the Interior, which thus had prospects of controlling all of the American dependencies, that the Navy would soon face enormous responsibilities in civil affairs. But in 1873 the Congress assigned all of the dependencies of that time to the Department of the Interior, while in 1898 the supervision of government in the Philippines went to the War Department. The Chief Clerk of the Department later recalled that
for the sake of ready reference, the first of the Cuban customs cases that reached his desk, were filed there temporarily, being foreign to even the miscellaneous class of records filed in the long established record division. When several cases had accumulated he placed them in an empty file box on his desk. Papers of this nature and allied civil subjects accumulated so rapidly that the Assistant Secretary granted the services of one clerk. ...47
So began the Bureau of Insular Affairs, without preparation, without authorization other than that of immediate necessity. The War Department, building up an efficient organization, continued to serve the need as late as 1939, despite the fact that naval and commercial as well as military interests bound us, for instance, to the Philippines. No similar division of interest is now evident with regard to the Marshalls, Carolines, and Marianas. The prolonged argument over the fate of the former Spanish islands (which has not ended) probably contributed to preserving the War Department’s jurisdiction. Today the safest prophecy is that “the duration will last longer than the war.” Respect for the Navy, normally high even in times of apparent security and inactivity, is not likely to pass away rapidly after the reconquest of the Pacific. Whether it will or no, the Navy may find itself for many years in the business of de facto colonial government.
Author’s Note.—Since acceptance and editing of the foregoing article, Representative W. Sterling Cole (R., N. Y.) introduced a bill (H. J. Res. 55, 79th Congress, 1st Session, 6 January 1945) calling for “administration of the government of all external islands and territories hereafter coming under the jurisdiction of the United States” through the Navy Department. The bill also provided for establishment of an “Office of External Possessions” in the Navy Department, under an Assistant Secretary of the Navy for External Possessions, to administer not only new possessions but also Hawaii, Alaska, the Canal Zone, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and other islands. On January 15, 1945, Mr. Cole introduced H. J. Res. 69, by which the Office of External Possessions was to administer Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and newly acquired islands and areas, but apparently not Hawaii, Alaska, and the Canal Zone. Army and Navy Journal, LXXXII (January 20, 1945), 628; Cong. Rec., 79 Cong., 1 Sess., 278. On January 23, 1945, a subcommittee of the House Naval Affairs Committee, headed by Representative Patrick H. Drewry (D. Va.) was appointed to study the question of American possession of the Japanese mandates. New York Times, January 24,1945, p. 10:2.
1. Text in New York Times, February 5, 1944, p. 4: 3-4.
2. Ralph H. Gabriel, “American Experience with Military Government,” American Political Science Review, XXXVII (June, 1943), 427-30.
3. Thoroughness of administrative preparation for the task is suggested by the near identity of the instructions to the occupying forces issued by Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones in 1842 and by Commodore John D. Sloat in 1846. House Executive Documents, 27 Cong.,Sess., No. 166, pp. 78-79; ibid., 29 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 19, pp. 103-4.
4. Dudley W. Knox, A History of the United States Navy (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1936), 101-2, and cf. 151, 154.
5.E.g., Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies, Ser. I, Vol. VI, 173.
6. Francis L. Hawks, Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan . . . (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1857), 106.
7. Ibid., 106-8, 375. Cf. the instructions to Lt. Charles Wilkes (1838) relative to a port in the Fiji Islands. Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition. . . . (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1845), I, xxv-xxvi.
8. Alfred Zimmermann, Die Kolonialpolitik Porlugals und Spaniens . . . , Die Europdischen Kolonien . . . , I (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1896) 216.
9. Ralph G. Lounsbury, The British Fishery at Newfoundland 1634-1763 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 126-27, 132-33, 274-77, 284.
10. Helen Taft Manning, British Colonial Government After the American Revolution, 1782-1820 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933), 96, 84.
11. Stephen H. Roberts, History of French Colonial Policy (1870-1925) (London: B. S. King & Son, Ltd., 1929), I, 124-27; Thomas E. Ennis, French Policy and Achievements in Indochina (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), 59.
12. Lounsbury, op. cit., 142-43.
13. Ibid., 172-73, 175-76.
14. International Conciliation, No. 397 (February, 1944), 149.
15, 69 per cent affirmative, 17 per cent negative. New York Times, May 34, 1944 (late city edition), p. 7: 5. Former President Hoover told the Republican convention (June 27, 1944) that “We want not territory except some Pacific island bases that will protect the United States.” Ibid., June 28, 1944, p. 16:5.
16. Annual Report to the League of Nations on the Administration of the South Sea Islands under Japanese Mandate for the Year 1924 (Geneva: League of Nations, 1925), 9, 12.
17. The United States Naval Advisory Staff headed by Admiral Benson in 1918 recommended that the German islands “be internationalized.” David Hunter Miller, My Diary at the Conference of Paris, with Documents (New York: Appeal Printing Co., 1924), II, 107. However, that suggestion apparently represented a compromise intended to keep the Carolines and Marshalls out of Japanese control. Ibid., 106. The experiences of the condominiums in Samoa (1889-1899) and the New Hebrides (since 1906) have not been altogether encouraging. See Linden A. Mander, “The New Hebrides Condominium,” Pacific Historical Review, XIII (June, 1944), 151-67. The Universities Committee on Post- War International Problems has urged that the United States accept responsibility for colonial government after the War, recommending creation of an international colonial commission to supervise administration. New York Times, March 10,1944, p. 11:1.
18. Paul Knaplund, The British Empire, 1815-1939 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 249-50. A plan to decentralize the government of the Netherlands West Indies, however, was recently reported. New York Times, May 5, 1944, p. 9:2.
19. Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Territories and Insular Affairs, United States Senate, 75 Cong., 1 Sess., on S. 145, April 9,10, 16, and June 9, 1937, p. 15. Budgetary and pedagogical considerations might make it expedient also to combine or coordinate the training of civil affairs officers with that of intelligence officers and others. A. Lawrence Lowell suggested that Philippine civil servants would be too few to justify separate training. Colonial Civil Service; The Selection and Training of Colonial Officials in England Holland, and France (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1900), 228.
20. Paul Leroy-Beaulieau, De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (5th edition; Paris: Guillaumin, 1902), II, 692.
21. A Half Century of Naval Service (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1922), 268-69.
22. William E. Safford, “Extracts from the Note-Book of a Naturalist on the Island of Guam,” The Plant World, V (October, 1902), 1 (page numbering from Library of Congress bound copy of reprints).
23. Schroeder, op. cit., 231. Schroeder’s interest in the cause of legally constituted civil government under the Navy Department and in American citizenship for inhabitants of Guam later was remembered with gratitude. Hearings . . . , April 9, 10, 16, and June 9, 1937, pp. 104-5.
24. Schroeder, op. cit., 5.
25. Theodore Roosevelt, Colonial Policies of the United States (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1937), 99-100.
26. Joseph M. Jones, “Let’s Begin with Puerto Rico…,” Fortune, XXIX (May, 1944), 195.
27. Charles S. Hyneman, “The Army’s Civil Affairs Training Program,” American Political Science Review, XXXVIII (April, 1944), 342-53. On the Navy’s program at Columbia, see Schuyler C. Wallace, “The Naval School of Military Government and Administration,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, CCXXXI (January, 1944), 29-33; William H. Hessler, “Military Government in the Navy,” U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, LXIX (November, 1943), 1471-74; and “Military Government School . . . ,” Bureau of Naval Personnel, Training Bulletin, March 15,1944, pp. 1-9. The recent announcement that training of civil affairs personnel for the Navy was to be discontinued after the classes beginning on December 1, 1944 at Princeton and on December 31, 1944 at Columbia was qualified by a statement that training of additional military government personnel would depend on future needs. Army and Navy Journal, LXXXII (November 4, 1944), 301: 4. Early press reports from the Marshalls indicated that the first civil affairs officers on Kwajalein had been trained at the University of Virginia. New York Times, February 10, 1944, p. 4: 5.
28. According to Stephen H. Roberts, “it was not until recent years that there was even an agitation to train all British officials in anthropology—and it still remains an agitation.” Op. cit., II, 653. Cf. Lowell, op. cit., 43-5, 70-1.
29. Robert Edward Coontz, From the Mississippi to the Sea (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co., Inc., c1930), 331.
30. Testimony of Captain H. F. Bryan (governor 1925-1927) in Joint Hearings before the Committee on Territories and Insular Possessions . . . and the Committee on Insular Affairs ..., 70 Cong., 1 Sess., on S. Con. Res. 2, January 17,20, and 21,1928, pp. 49-51.
31. Felix M. Keesing, Modern Samoa, Its Government and Changing Economic Life (Stanford University: Stanford University Press, 1934), 96-7.
32. Joint Hearings . . . , January 17, 20, and 21, 1928, pp. 95-96.
33. New York Times, September 20,1930, p. 2:4.
34. Junius B. Wood reported Japanese medical officers saying in the spring of 1921 that 90% of patients had venereal diseases, 60% yaws. “Yap and Other Pacific Islands under Japanese Mandate,” National Geographic Magazine, XL (December, 1921), 623. American officers in 1944 found 97 syphilitics (Kahn positives) among 111 males examined, and indications of yaws in all. Anselm C. Hohn and Frank S. Ashburn, “Medical Pioneering in the Marshalls,” United States Naval Institute Proceedings, LXX (September, 1944), 1087-93.
35. New York Times, October 1,1944, p. 32:3.
36. CXXI (September 9, 1925), 266.
37. Lennox A. Mills, “The Future of Western Dependencies in South Eastern Asia and the Pacific,” American Political Science Review, XXXVII (October, 1943), 914.
38. Commodore Stockton’s proclamation of an organic act—similar to the act for Louisiana and Orleans in 1804—for California was unauthorized and of no effect. House Executive Documents, 29 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 19, pp. 109-10, 2.
39. Hearings . . . April 9, 10, 16, and June 9, 1937, p. 104. Governor Seaton Schroeder in 1901 forwarded with his recommendation a petition by citizens of Guam asking for a permanent form of civil government. House Documents, 57 Cong., 1 Sess., no. 419, pp. 1-4. Failure of Congress to define the laws, personal rights and powers of the executive has been criticized often by naval officers. E.g., Civil Engineer Leonard M. Cox, “The Island of Guam,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, XXXVI (July, 1904), 395.
40. Joint Hearings . . . , January 17, 20, and 21, 1928, p. 105.
41.A similar idea is expressed more sensationally in a pamphlet on Civil Liberties in American Colonies (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1939), 29: “Where a naval captain exerts a dictatorial power over 12,000 people, controlling even their financial institutions, it is obvious that civil liberty depends on the whims of a single individual.”
42. Schroeder, op. cit., 245. Cf. the “Instructions for the Military Commander of the Island of Guam . . . , January 12, 1899,” Nation, CXXI (August 19,1925), 216-17.
43. New York Times, October 1, 1944, p. 32: 3.
44. E.g., Eric D. Walrond, “Autocracy in the Virgin Islands,” Current History Magazine, XIX (October, 1923), 121.
45. Safford, op. cit., VII (June, 1904), 6.
46. Governor of the French Sudan, 1935; of Guadeloupe, 1936-1939; of French Equatorial Africa, 1939- 1944. Obituary in New York Times, May 18,1944, p. 19: 4.
47. House Documents, 57 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 2, Part 1, p. 772.