Civilizing the Guam Museum Christine Taitano DeLisle University of Michigan University of Michigan Working Papers in Museum Studies Number 4 (2010) Museum Studies Program Charles H. Sawyer Center for Museum Studies University of Michigan Museum of Art 525 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1354 Office phone: 734-936-6678 Fax: 734-786-0064 www.ummsp.lsa.umich.edu [email protected] © 2010 University of Michigan All rights reserved The University of Michigan Museum Studies Program’s series of “Working Papers in Museum Studies” presents emerging re- search from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, all focused on the multiple concerns of the modern museum and heritage stud- ies field. Contributions from scholars, members of the museum profession and graduate students are represented. Many of these papers have their origins in public presentations made under the auspices of the Museum Studies Program. We gratefully thank the authors published herein for their participation. This paper was first presented as part of the University of Michigan Museum Studies Program’s “Issues in Museum Studies” lecture series on April 16, 2009. It is the product of research supported by a U-M Museum Studies Program Fellowship for Doc- toral Research in Museums. Tina DeLisle is a member of the 2005 cohort in the U-M Museum Studies Program and is currently a research fellow and lecturer in the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. [email protected] Civilizing the Guam Museum the Guam Museum Civilizing Christine Taitano DeLisle Chamorros.5 Of particular interest is how both white and University of Michigan native members of the Legion saw the Museum as a vehicle for pushing political progress in Guam, most especially In 2006, the Guam Museum Foundation unveiled its plans U.S. citizenship for Chamorros. This is noteworthy for a new museum. According to Andrew Laguaña of because, though the push for U.S. citizenship might seem Architects Laguaña + Cristobal, the firm whose blueprint to be, from the perspective of an anti-colonial struggle, for the new museum was chosen as the winning design, the a conservative tack, the Chamorro leadership at the time design was inspired by the work of Chicago architect and understood that U.S. citizenship for the Chamorros would city planner Daniel Burnham. Quoting Burnham, Laguaña grant coverage and application of the U.S. Constitution over elaborated: the island and thus protect Chamorros against the whims of naval governance. U.S. citizenship was sought as a way Make No Little Plans; they have no magic to stir to gain political rights and civil liberties that just did not men’s blood and probably will themselves not be exist under military rule. Second, I focus on the prewar realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and relationship between the naval governor, Willis Bradley, work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram and the Legion. Bradley is most noted for championing a once recorded will not die, but long after we are Bill of Rights for Chamorros under his term (1929 to 1931), gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever- for which he was blackballed by the military hierarchy in growing insistency. Remember that our sons and Washington D.C. What is less known is that Bradley played grandsons are going to do things that would stagger a major role in assisting the Legion in the establishment us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon of the Guam Museum and that this relationship helped beauty. Think big.1 establish another crucial one between the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and the Guam Museum. This new relationship At $20 million, the largest public commission in Guam’s led to the restructuring of the Guam Museum and, history to-date, the 52,000 square-feet of museum space beginning in 1930, to the de-accessioning of objects from is indeed a grand (and for some, a grandiose) undertaking. the Bishop Museum to the Guam Museum. A second For this reason, the Guam Museum has stirred different instance of de-accessioning took place in 2000 when emotions: excitement, trepidation, and skepticism. There is the Bishop Museum repatriated a large set of Chamorro trepidation and skepticism, given the global recession and ancestral remains to Guam. Guam’s own fiscal hardship, but also excitement, because in its 79 years of existence—starting with what former Guam Museum Director (1995 to 2007) Tony Palomo called the Exhibiting Culture, History, and “One Hundred museum’s “modest beginning” under the American Legion Percent Americanism”: The Guam Museum —the Guam Museum has never had a permanent facility.2 under the American Legion This paper sets out to trace this “modest beginning” as part The Guam Museum opened its doors in 1932 under of a larger history that examines the transformation of the the auspices of the American Legion. Members of the Guam Museum from a civilizing and modernizing project American Expeditionary Forces founded the American under the auspices of military colonialism and U.S. Naval Legion in 1919 to improve troop morale during World War rule from 1898 to 1950, to a territorial government and I and the Guam-based Mid-Pacific Post Number 1, one nationalist project that struggles to balance a specifically of nearly 15,000 posts established worldwide, opened in indigenous heritage with a multicultural and multiracial 1930.6 Though this was the era of the Great Depression, society in Guam emergent in the second half of the 20th which had impacted the island to some degree, Guam century under self-rule.3 This paper and its title draw experienced relative growth in its physical and political from Elaine Gurian’s analyses of the changing definitions infrastructure. In 1929, for example, Governor Bradley of museums and the challenges that they face in the 21st addressed the question of the political rights of the century in colonial, postcolonial, and in Guam’s case, Chamorros, installing a local Bill of Rights for which he neo-colonial milieus.4 I focus on two particular moments is still fondly remembered.7 In keeping with the Legion’s in the pre-World War II history of the Guam Museum. larger mission to “preserve the memories and incidents First, I examine the establishment of the Museum in 1932 of the U.S. involvement in the Great Wars” and to “foster by the American Legion in Guam. This establishment and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism,” and sponsorship by the Legion culminated in a movement Post Number 1 organized activities on Guam such as that is intelligible within a naval colonial narrative Armistice Day.8 The Legion also did its share to promote of civilization and progress for Guam and the native the U.S. Navy’s larger civilizing and modernizing projects 1 UM Working Papers in Museum Studies, Number 4 (2010) in the areas of public education, public works, and public health.9 It awarded annual prizes for categories such In 1931, after heeding the concerns of U.S. Navy Chaplain as best school garden, best agricultural club work, best Francis Albert (one of its charter members), and with marching and drilling, and most beautiful schools.10 But The Guam Recorder assisting “in all ways possible,” beginning in 1931, the Legion pledged its resources “fully” the American Legion took up the Guam Museum to establishing the Guam Museum and identifying its (the cause.18 Albert, who was also Superintendent of Guam’s Legion’s) members as the Museum’s “official custodians.” Department of Education (D.O.E.), told fellow legionnaires: Later that year the Legion launched a fundraising campaign, the highlight of which was a minstrel show that I have noticed in the schools of Guam the children’s featured Chamorro and American military performers.11 Civilizing the Guam Museum Civilizing eagerness to grasp new ideas. Unlike in the States, or in other countries, where children are apt to Prior to 1932, there had already been talk about a museum. remain firm in their natural land traditions, the According to local historians in Guam, the Guam Teachers’ school children of Guam today have nothing Association, a predominantly-Chamorro organization, had by which to remember the customs of the older attempted to establish a museum but could not because it generations. Their penchant for absorbing new ideas had lacked the resources.12 In 1926, amidst debate on the is commendable, but we also must find means of subject of erecting monuments, the editor of the monthly preserving Guam’s relics and customs of the past for 19 newspaper, The Guam Recorder, identified a museum as them and those to come in the future. being of more value and benefit to the island. The Guam Recorder’s readership was comprised of American military Albert’s concerns echoed those expressed by The Guam in Guam, their families in the U.S., and elite Chamorros. Recorder editor in 1926 about the urgency in preserving the The editor, W. W. Rowley, was a prominent American island’s historical relics in the onset of American modernity businessman and civic leader of the Elks Club and Masons under the U.S. Navy, with both Americans operating on in Guam. Rowley had also married into a Chamorro family. the assumption that Chamorro culture was extinct. For the Rowley judged that a museum was an “urgent” matter for D.O.E. Superintendent, Chamorro children had “nothing by Guam, pointing out that the “specimens of historical value which to remember the customs of their older generations.” and interest have been collected and sent away from the When he compared them to other children in America island,” and that it would not be long before it was “too late and other countries, perhaps he was referring to Native to start to collect these articles which museums are so keen Americans and other natives who held “firm in their natural on securing.”13 “If Guam had a Museum,” he continued, land traditions.” “many of these speciments (sic) … would probably be returned to us.”14 Rowley was referring specifically to For the Editor of The Guam Recorder, the principal Hans Hornbostel, who had been commissioned by the import for a museum was the lack of credible information Bishop Museum in Honolulu to collect specimens and about Guam’s past.