Guam

• 1. Introduction

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  Guam's de facto motto is "Where America's Day Begins," a phrase that points to the island's place against the International Date Line. It is the westernmost point and territory of the United States, measured from the geographic center of the country at point Udall. In 2022 its population stood at 168,801 people, spread across an island of just 210 square miles. The Chamorro are the indigenous people, the largest single ethnic group, yet still a minority on a crowded, multiethnic island. They settled these shores roughly 3,500 years ago, long before any European set eyes on them. How did a small island in the western Pacific become a strategic asset for a nation thousands of miles away? Why do its people poll strongly for American statehood while sitting on a United Nations list of non-self-governing territories? And what was lost, and what survived, across four centuries of foreign rule?

• 2. The First Voyagers

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  Guam and the other Mariana Islands were the first islands settled by humans in Remote Oceania. That journey was the first and the longest of the ocean-crossing voyages of the Austronesian peoples. It stands separate from the later Polynesian settlement of the rest of Remote Oceania. The first migrants arrived around 1500 to 1400 BC, departing from the Philippines. A second migration followed from the Caroline Islands in the first millennium AD. A third wave came by 900 AD, likely from the Philippines or eastern Indonesia.

  Ancient Chamorro society divided itself into four classes: chamorri or chiefs, the upper-class matua, the middle-class achaot, and the lower-class mana'chang. The matua lived in coastal villages with the best access to fishing grounds, while the mana'chang lived in the island's interior. The two groups rarely spoke, and the matua often used achaot as intermediaries. Alongside the social order stood the makahna, shamans with magical powers, and the suruhanu and suruhana, healers who made medicine from plants and natural materials. Belief in ancestral spirits called Taotao mo'na still persists today as a remnant of pre-European culture. It is held that only the suruhanu or suruhana can safely gather plants from the wild without provoking the wrath of those spirits.

  The Chamorro built their homes upon colonnades of megalithic capped pillars known as latte stones, found nowhere else but the Mariana Islands. Each latte stone joins a limestone base called the haligi to a capstone, the tasa, made from a large brain coral or from limestone. These pillars were a recent development in pre-contact Chamorro society. A possible source for them, the Rota Latte Stone Quarry, was discovered in 1925 on the island of Rota.

• 3. Four Centuries Of Spain

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  On the 6th of March 1521, the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan sighted Guam while sailing for the King of Spain during his fleet's circumnavigation of the globe. The island was not officially claimed for Spain until the 26th of January 1565, by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi. From 1565 to 1815, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands served as the only Spanish outposts in the Pacific east of the Philippines. They became reprovisioning stops for the Manila galleons, the fleet that crossed the Pacific trade route between Acapulco and Manila.

  Spanish colonization began in earnest on the 15th of June 1668, when a mission led by Diego Luis de San Vitores arrived and built the first Catholic church. These islands fell under the Spanish East Indies and the Viceroyalty of New Spain, governed from Mexico City. The Spanish-Chamorro Wars erupted on Guam in 1670 over rising tensions with the Jesuit mission, with the last large-scale uprising in 1683. Warfare combined with disaster to devastate the population. The typhoons of 1671 and 1693, and above all the smallpox epidemic of 1688, drove the Chamorro from 50,000 people down to 10,000, and finally to fewer than 5,000.

  The island became a rest stop for whalers starting in 1823. A typhoon struck on the 10th of August 1848, followed by a severe earthquake on the 25th of January 1849, which sent refugees from the Caroline Islands fleeing a resulting tsunami. That tremor was far more powerful than the 8.2 quake recorded on the 8th of August 1993. After a smallpox epidemic killed 3,644 Guamanians in 1856, Carolinians and Japanese were permitted to settle in the Marianas. By the time it ended, Spanish administration had lasted close to 300 years and reshaped the island's language, names, and faith.

• 4. America Arrives

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  Captain Richard P. Leary became Guam's first naval governor in 1899, after the United States occupied the island following Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American War. Control had passed to the United States Navy on the 23rd of December 1898, by Executive Order 108-A from the 25th president, William McKinley. Under the Treaty of Paris of 1898, Spain ceded Guam, ending almost four centuries as part of the Kingdom of Spain.

  The naval administration set about building infrastructure to serve the island's strategic position. One project established a coaling station to service naval vessels traveling between Hawaii and the Philippines. Officials improved roads, sanitation, and public health, and opened public schools that taught in English, aiming to assimilate the Chamorro population into American culture. The benefits came with sharp limits. Civil liberties were restricted, and the local population had little say in government.

  Chamorro leaders pressed for change from early on. They petitioned for U.S. citizenship and greater political autonomy as early as 1901, though those efforts largely failed. In 1936, delegates Baltazar J. Bordallo and Francisco B. Leon Guerrero traveled to Washington, D.C., to petition in person for Chamorro citizenship. Substantial political reform still did not come. The pattern of petition and refusal would define the island's relationship with Washington for decades to come.

• 5. The First Shots

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  On the 10th of December 1914, the SMS Cormoran, a German armed merchant raider, was forced into Apra Harbor after running short on coal while pursued by the Japanese. The United States, then neutral, refused to supply enough provisions for the ship to reach a German port. The vessel and her crew were interned until 1917. The standoff held until war reached the island by cable.

  On the morning of the 7th of April 1917, word arrived by telegraph that the U.S. Congress had declared war on Germany. Naval Governor Roy Campbell Smith sent two officers to inform Captain Adalbert Zuckschwerdt that a state of war existed and that the ship must be surrendered. The USS Supply blocked the harbor entrance. A barge under Lieutenant W.A. Hall, the designated prize master, carried 18 sailors and 15 Marines from the barracks at Sumay. Spotting a launch from the Cormoran hauling supplies ashore, Hall ordered shots fired across its bow until it stopped.

  Zuckschwerdt agreed to surrender his crew but refused to give up the ship, and the Americans warned it would be treated as an enemy combatant. The Germans had secretly placed an explosive device in the coal bunker. Minutes after the Americans left, an explosion hurled debris across the harbor and the crew began abandoning ship. Rescuers saved all but seven of the roughly 370 men aboard. This incident counted as the first violent action of the United States in World War I, the first shots fired against Germany, the first German prisoners of war captured, and the first Germans killed in action by the U.S. in that war.

• 6. Occupation And Liberation

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  On the 8th of December 1941, at the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Empire of Japan invaded Guam in a battle that ran from December 8 to 10. The Japanese renamed the island Omiya-jima, meaning Great Shrine Island. Their occupation lasted about 31 months. During that time the indigenous people endured beatings, forced labor, family separation, concentration camps, massacres, beheadings, and rape.

  Approximately 1,100 Chamorros were killed during the occupation, according to U.S. Congressional committee testimony in 2004. Some historians estimate that war violence killed 10 percent of Guam's population of 20,000. American forces returned in the 1944 Battle of Guam, fought from the 21st of July to the 10th of August. The 21st of July became a territorial holiday, Liberation Day, still commemorated on the island.

• 7. Becoming A Territory

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  The Guam Organic Act of 1950 established Guam as an unincorporated organized territory of the United States. It set up the structure of a civilian government and granted the people U.S. citizenship. That citizenship did not include full civil and political rights. The Organic Act excluded the right to trial by jury, and mobilization continued until the territory held its first jury trial in 1956. The governor was federally appointed until 1968, when the Guam Elective Governor Act provided for popular election of the office.

  Because Guam is not a U.S. state, its citizens cannot vote for president, and their only representation in Congress is a non-voting delegate in the House. The current delegate is Republican James Moylan, who can vote in committee and speak to the House but not on final passage. In a presidential straw poll, residents record their choice, but with no votes in the Electoral College the poll has no real effect. The island does, however, send delegates to the national party conventions.

  The push to redefine the island's status has stalled again and again. In a 1982 plebiscite, voters showed interest in commonwealth status, but the federal government rejected Guam's proposed version as incompatible with the Territorial Clause of the U.S. Constitution. A second constitutional convention produced a constitution that the people overwhelmingly rejected in August 1979, with 82 percent opposed. In 1997 a Commission on Decolonization was formed to educate residents about statehood, free association, and independence. In May 2016 the U.S. Department of the Interior approved a $300,000 grant for decolonization education, which executive director Edward Alvarez announced to a United Nations seminar that same month.

• 8. Reefs, Snakes, And Storms

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  Mount Lamlam rises 1,334 feet above sea level as Guam's highest point, yet measured from the nearby Challenger Deep, the deepest surveyed point in the oceans, it ranks as the world's tallest mountain at 37,820 feet. The island stretches 30.17 miles long and 4 to 12 miles wide, covering an area of 212 square miles. It sits on the micro Mariana Plate, formed by the collision of the Pacific and Philippine Sea tectonic plates, and is the closest land mass to the Mariana Trench. Volcanic eruptions in the Eocene built the base of the island, after which coral reef turned to limestone and tectonic activity thrust the northern plateau upward.

  Guam has a tropical rainforest climate, hot and humid year-round with little seasonal variation. Average annual rainfall reached 98 inches between 1981 and 2010. The wettest month on record was August 1997, with 38.49 inches, and the driest was February 2015, with 0.15 inches. The highest temperature ever recorded was 96 degrees Fahrenheit, on the 18th of April 1971 and again on the 1st of April 1990. The island lies in the path of typhoons, with the highest risk from August to November. Since Typhoon Pamela in 1976, wooden structures have largely given way to concrete.

  The island's wildlife has suffered heavily from invasion. The arrival of the brown tree snake caused the local extinction of endemic bird species. Of 14 kinds of terrestrial birds Guam once hosted, all but one are now extinct, extirpated, or endangered. The Guam rail became the second bird species ever to be downlisted from Extinct in the Wild, after a population was established on Cocos Island. Reefs face their own pressures from pollution, eroded silt, and overfishing, and one study found that Guam's reefs are worth 127 million U.S. dollars per year.

  Joint Region Marianas holds jurisdiction over military installations covering roughly 39,000 acres, about 29 percent of the island's total land area. These include U.S. Naval Base Guam at Santa Rita, Andersen Air Force Base at Yigo, and Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz at Dededo. Under a special law from Congress, it is Guam's own treasury, rather than the U.S. treasury, that receives federal income taxes paid by local taxpayers, including military and civilian federal employees on the island.

  In 2010 the military proposed building a new aircraft carrier berth and moving 8,600 Marines and 9,000 of their dependents to Guam from Okinawa, Japan. With construction workers included, the buildup would have raised the island's population by 79,000, a 49 percent increase over its 2010 figure of 160,000. In a February 2010 letter, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency criticized the plans over a water shortfall, sewage problems, and the impact on coral reefs. In 2022 the Marine Corps decided to place 5,000 Marines on the island within the first half of the decade, with 1,300 already stationed.

  The military shaped tourism too. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy's removal of Guam's security clearance allowed a tourism industry to develop. In the early 1990s, when the United States closed its bases at Subic Bay and Clark Air Base in the Philippines, many forces relocated to Guam. The island now serves as a major hub for submarine communications cables between the Western U.S., Hawaii, Australia, and Asia, with twelve cables running through it, most continuing to China.