The Not-Quite States of America

by Doug Mack

  THE TERRITORIES represent an offshoring of the American experience—recruiting soldiers, fighting battles, but also engaging in the soft diplomacy of tourism and greeting immigrants. Nearby countries look to the territories as a stand-in for the USA. That’s the exact point of the Latte of Freedom: it is nothing less than a broadcast of American Exceptionalism and a representation of all the things the United States of America supposedly stands for. Representative democracy. Opportunity. Egalitarianism. Giant roadside attractions. Waffles with six inches of whipped cream on top.

  This is the story we, as Americans, tell ourselves about Who We Are. It’s a story to be proud of, a story with much truth. But as my travels through the territories were reminding me anew, you pull back the curtain on mythology at your own risk. The tourists and Americans who worship old-school cowboys would probably rather not know that these archetypes of ruggedness weren’t as self-reliant or even as numerous as we like to think. As David Hamilton Murdoch details in The American West: The Invention of a Myth, Wild Bill was “a cold-blooded killer [and] Phoebe Anne Oakley Mozee was entirely the creation of show business,” as was much of our modern-day conception of the Wild West. And even as I can’t shake my fondness for Teddy Roosevelt—the Poe-quoting! the grizzled swagger! the national parks! the progressive reforms!—it’s undeniable that his view of the territories was, well, racist: “The expansion of the peoples of white, or European, blood during the past four centuries has been fraught with lasting benefit to most of the peoples already dwelling in the lands over which the expansion took place.” Roosevelt served as William McKinley’s vice president until 1901, when McKinley was assassinated—and suddenly Teddy was the leader of the United States. When the time came to appoint a new Supreme Court justice in 1902, he had one specific litmus test: he would only choose someone who would uphold the Insular Cases. His appointee, Oliver Wendell Holmes, did just that.

  “Myth cannot indefinitely act as a substitute for history,” Murdoch says of the Wild West, arguing against the notion that “a democratic people’s ability to order its society and government . . . can only be managed by general subscription to a set of inventions.”

  Bit by bit, as a high-level picture of the territories had come into focus in my mind, a deeper, myth-busting reality was also taking form: First, the territories matter. You cannot write an honest master narrative of the United States of America without including the territories as key components. And you cannot write an honest master narrative of the territories without feeling acutely uncomfortable about the United States and its continuing struggles to live up to its own ideals.

  In 1957, at the same time that Guam was off-limits for travel, a new case related to the territories, Reid v. Covert, came before the Supreme Court. And while the court’s decision didn’t overturn the Insular Cases, it chipped away at them, an acknowledgment of changing views about overseas possessions and colonialism. Justice Hugo Black, in his plurality opinion, undercut the very foundation of the Insular Cases:

  The concept that the Bill of Rights and other Constitutional protections against arbitrary government are inoperant when they become inconvenient or when expediency dictates otherwise is a very dangerous doctrine and if allowed to flourish would destroy the benefit of a written Constitution and undermine the basis of our government.

  THE WARNINGS of the typhoon became increasingly dire and ubiquitous as the clock ticked down—it was just a day away. I stopped into a souvenir shop for some postcards, and paused for a moment to watch the television behind the counter; the chipper newscaster read a statement: “The governor’s office advises that pregnant women at thirty-eight weeks or later should get admitted to Guam General.”

  The storm was expected to make landfall right around the time I was supposed to fly out to my next stop, Saipan, about 140 miles north and out of harm’s way. I called the airline and got rebooked on an earlier flight, leaving late that night. I would beat the typhoon.

  In the meantime, I had one last thing to check off my list. “Doug, you have to see a sunset here,” Mars had told me. “I’ve seen my share of nice sunsets around the world, and Guam’s are up there at the top.”

  I hadn’t seen one yet—somehow I’d always been indoors or otherwise occupied—but now the skies briefly cleared up, giving me one last window of opportunity.

  I drove over to a park in Hagåtña and parked by the Paseo Stadium, as two baseball teams took the field. High above the parking lot buzzed a drone with flashing red and green lights; nearby, five or six old men played cards in a little picnic shelter. I sat at the water’s edge and a couple of long outrigger canoes glided by, each with five paddlers in perfect sync and corporate logos on the sleek hulls. Up the coast, the hotels of Tumon stood sentry on the waterfront, and I could picture the streets filling up with tourists, out for an evening of shopping or shooting, maybe both.

  The sky churned through slow-motion pyrotechnics, swaths of gold, streaks of purple, and a diorama of clouds, one of each kind: the long, wispy ones; the perfectly formed claymation ones; the fuzzy balls sheared from a sheep. It was everything Mars had promised.

  Far-off, unintelligible yelling broke my reverie. It got louder, closer, but I couldn’t quite make out the words until I finally saw the source: a group of trim young men jogging through the park, belting out a call-and-response:

  “HUH!”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “HUH!”

  “A little bit louder!”

  “One, two, three, four, UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS!”

  * The World’s Largest Kmart looks exactly like you’d expect. I spent fifty-two minutes there, entering by walking through a triumphal arch of snacks emblazoned with the proclamation CELEBRATE FREEDOM WITH FRITO-LAY.

  † Gilmer was a special one. His other orders included one to outlaw “dancing the fandango” after ten p.m.

  ‡ By Carl’s estimate, there were more than a dozen motorcycle clubs on Guam, including “the Hogs, the Hawgs, the Legends, the Warriors . . .”

  § Tweed recounted his experiences in his memoir Robinson Crusoe, USN, which was adapted into the 1962 film No Man Is an Island—which was shot in the Philippines, with Filipinos speaking Tagalog as the stand-in for Chamorros who primarily spoke English.

  ¶ The only other This American Life story I found with a territory connection was one about a family that moved from American Samoa to Alaska, where the story took place.

  # The best source of information I’ve found for the Pacific territories, aside from their own media outlets, is Radio New Zealand.

  ** Aside from the USA’s northernmost point, in Alaska, all extreme points are in the U.S. territories and, in their own way, fit their surroundings: the easternmost point, in the USVI, is a well-known tourist attraction; Tutuila’s southernmost point requires bushwhacking on ’aiga land to access; and the westernmost point, on Guam, is on a Navy base, off-limits to the public.

  Chapter 4

  LAND

  OF

  OPPORTUNITY

  The Northern

  Mariana Islands

  THE U.S. TERRITORIES ATTRACT A PARTICULAR BREED of outsiders: dreamers, dropouts, eccentrics, self-made men and women who find these places fertile ground for their schemes or their escapes. There are the community-oriented plotters like John Wasko in American Samoa, along with the straight-out-of-fiction types like the Contessa of Saint Croix. As Carl and Tony drove me around, Tony idly read the news on his phone and found a headline reading “Russian Hacker Found on Guam”—the man, it turned out, was “one of the world’s most prolific traffickers of stolen financial information.”

  In my first few days on Saipan—the capital and largest of the Northern Mariana Islands—I met so many outsiders with big dreams that I began to wonder if there was some sort of governmental pitch: Remake Yourself in the Northern Mariana Islands.

  There was a Jamaican named Walt Goodridge, a former civil engineer for New York City’s Port Authority, who moved to Saip
an somewhat impulsively in 2006. Trim and eternally smiling, he’d carved out a niche as a self-described “nomadic minimalist vegan” entrepreneurism coach, self-help author, and tour guide. Laurie Peterka, an energetic Californian in beaded flip-flops and a jade pendant, had lived here since 1993, when she was twenty-six. She belonged to the local Rotary Club and had built a career as a local business consultant.

  “One of the great things about Saipan is the ability to keep reinventing yourself over and over,” a man named Brad Ruszala told me when I met him for drinks one night at Godfather’s, an agreeably divey bar in Garapan, Saipan’s tourist district. Brad moved to Saipan from the states in 2003 to work for Homeland Security, before becoming a sports reporter for the local newspaper, a radio host, and then a television anchor. He looked the part, with short hair and a crisp collared shirt.

  On Saipan, Brad said, “I don’t feel like a fish being asked to climb a tree”—he felt free to be himself. “I live the life of a movie star here.” For a while, he hosted Girls’ Night Out at the local Hard Rock Café. Brad met his wife on Saipan, and now, he said, beaming, they have two awesome kids. He leaned back in the booth, with the carefree air of a man fully satisfied with, and a bit shocked by, his lot in life. For a few moments, he looked around the room, soaking it up. Godfather’s was decorated with an Al Capone poster, newspaper clippings on the wall; there was a rock band playing in the corner and a full house of mainlanders.

  The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (everyone just says “the CNMI”) is the least populous of all the territories, with some fifty-four thousand people, about 90 percent of them on Saipan, and nearly all of the rest on neighboring Tinian and Rota, with just a handful on the eleven northern islands. Because the territory is so small and close-knit, Brad said, one person can have a huge impact on the community. Heck, he and the governor were connected on LinkedIn, he added with a touch of amazement. Brad had organized a triathlon, so now he was the triathlon guy. His friend Angelo Villagomez was “the Beautify the CNMI guy,” thanks to an environmental cleanup program he’d initiated. If you want to get civically involved, you can do it here, Brad said. “I came out here and learned how to be a better American.”

  A lawyer Brad knew stopped by the table. She twirled a string of pink plastic beads, casually mentioned a case she was working on, then threw back a vodka shot with a whoop.

  The new arrivals who thrive—in the territories as anywhere—are the ones who immerse themselves in the community and the culture, like Brad and Walt and Laurie.

  If you’re an outsider moving to Saipan, it’s probably not going to work out if you “come expecting to change the island,” Angelo Villagomez later told me. You have to just go with the flow and let the island change you. “Most of the people who do come are either saviors or savers,” hoping either “to convert people to Christianity or save the environment or rescue the puppies . . . or they’re there for the hookers.”

  Angelo laughed ruefully. He had a mop of black hair that fell over his ears and a tattoo on one of his thick forearms, with several bands of geometric patterns. He’d already told me about one of Saipan’s most infamous arrivals, billionaire Larry Hillblom, the H of the shipping company DHL, who moved here to avoid federal income tax, got himself appointed to the CNMI Supreme Court, and—as detailed in James D. Scurlock’s 2012 book King Larry—used Saipan as a jumping-off point for his trips to brothels in Vietnam and the Philippines, before dying, in 1995, when he crashed his vintage Seabee into the ocean. Not all self-made men have triumphant endings.

  “A lot of people move to Saipan and Saipan burns them, hard core,” Angelo said. He, Walt, Laurie, and many others with whom I spoke bemoaned a blog published in the early 2000s called Saipan Sucks. Its initially anonymous author was eventually revealed to be a commonwealth attorney general, a mainland transplant who only lasted a few years and whose writing painted a coarse, sarcastic picture of an incurably corrupt island. He got burned, Angelo said. “I don’t know the story of what happened to him. Don’t care.” For a while, Saipan Sucks dominated the search-engine results for anyone looking for online information about the island; along with other local bloggers, Angelo made a concerted effort on his website, the Saipan Blog, to tout the island’s natural beauty and hospitality.

  “Saipan is the most welcoming place on the planet,” Angelo had told me in an email before I arrived, and every day I met people who proved him right. And the landscape really was gorgeous, with a sky so pristinely blue that it felt manufactured and seemingly endless flame trees, ablaze with bright orange flowers.

  But there was also an unmistakable sense that all was not well on Saipan, a disquieting feeling that the whole island had been burned, hard core.

  GARAPAN WAS a smaller, more down-on-its-luck version of Tumon on Guam. There were places to rent a Mustang or shoot an M16 or buy a Rolex. There were duty-free malls and a high-rise Westin and the Hard Rock Café where Brad used to host Girls’ Night Out. There were gift shops, a small wax museum, and a short pedestrian promenade called the Paseo de Marianas. And on posters and shop-window stickers around Garapan, a bit of whimsy: the local tourism logo, an anime-esque panda with a golden horn, called a Saipanda. (It’s a punning nod to the Japanese visitors, who have long been vital to the local economy. Phonetically, “Sai” means rhino in Japanese and “panda” means panda, but split the word differently and it becomes “Saipan-da,” or, roughly, It’s Saipan!)

  But for every Standard Touristville storefront, there were another one or two, or entire buildings, that were long-shuttered and starting to crumble. Even Club Happiness was boarded up. And many of the operating businesses betrayed a decidedly unsavory side of the island: sad-looking poker rooms with happy-sounding names (U Luck Poker, High Roller Poker), massage parlors whose signs advertised curiously late hours, karaoke clubs where, as in American Samoa, singing was not really the main attraction. Every evening, I took a stroll along the main streets, and every evening, I got propositioned more than once.

  Saipan is twelve miles long by five and half miles wide, and my first morning, I rented a car and spent a few hours driving around, well, all of it. I headed north first, and for a mile or so a sheer cliff rose just off the road, the coarse rock an art-directed counterpoint to the flame trees and sky. There were villages with kids playing in yards and resorts with tour buses outside, but very little traffic. A quiet breeze rustled the leaves, and now and then I could hear a weed-whacker, that modern-day machete.

  But the overall quietude wasn’t always a bucolic stillness. It was often the stillness of abandonment: empty houses, empty shops, entire vacant factory complexes, with broken windows and the occasional tree growing out of a roof.

  I pulled my Hyundai to a halt when I saw an entire abandoned mall. Two stories, two long wings, an open plaza with an amphitheater and a fountain. Sea-foam-green walls with pink accents—very early nineties, post–Miami Vice. Large letters lay scattered on the ground and in muddy puddles below the latticed entrance arch, like pieces from an upturned Scrabble board. They spelled out LA FIESTA. Laurie Peterka told me that when she moved to Saipan, her first job was as the head of the mall’s tenants organization—back then, in the early 1990s, it was a lively place: Donna Karan, Tony Roma’s, GUESS, Chanel, Rolex, more than forty stores in all. Now: an empty shell.

  Across the street, the massive Palms Resort—313 rooms, I would later learn—also stood abandoned and deteriorating.*

  The more modern the ghost town, the more disconcerting it is. Pompeii has a certain charm. Chernobyl does not. Recent ruins indicate recent, relatable failings: THIS COULD BE YOU. Here, not too long ago, were vigor and joy and laughter and big plans. And then something went horribly wrong.

  IT’S BEEN a long-term struggle for the CNMI “to get its footing,” Laurie told me, in part because the islands have been passed among five different overseers in just over a century, with not a moment of self-rule.

  The CNMI, like Guam—their southern neighbor in
the Marianas archipelago—have ancient Chamorro roots and a history of Spanish colonialism, but around 1815 a new group began arriving: native Carolinians (or Refaluwasch, “people of our land,” in their native language), whose ancestral islands to the south had been devastated by a typhoon. They settled on Saipan, Tinian, and the smaller northern islands, including Pagan and Aguijan, all of which had been essentially uninhabited since the Spanish forced their Chamorro inhabitants to Guam and Rota between 1698 and 1730. The chief who led Carolinians here, Aghurubw, is buried on the islet of Mañagaha, just offshore from Garapan, where parasailers now buzz around the sacred site all day.

  After the Spanish-American War, the United States took over Guam while the rest of the Marianas went to . . . Germany. Blame Captain Henry Glass for this unlikely plot twist. His specific orders were “to capture the port of Guam”—which he did, after some awkward missteps—and then, mission accomplished, sailed on to the Philippines, leaving no occupying forces in the rest of the Marianas. This meant that, by international treaty, the USA hadn’t actually claimed the other islands, which gave the savvy Germans, themselves trying to build a Pacific empire, an opening to negotiate with Spain. And when Germany lost World War I, Japan took the islands as spoils of war, and started planning its empire.

  The partition of the Marianas “cost America dearly” a generation later, observes Tinian-based historian Don Farrell. “With the Marianas fully fortified [by the USA], Japan might instead have turned its martial spirit toward its traditional enemy, Russia,” in the run-up to World War II. Instead, Japan expanded into the Pacific, and the Mariana Islands were split between two soon-to-be combatants.