American Pacificism

Oceania in the U.S. Imagination

Paul Lyons

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134264148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

This provocative analysis and critique of American representations of Oceania and Oceanians from the nineteenth century to the present, argues that imperial fantasies have glossed over a complex, violent history. It introduces the concept of 'American Pacificism', a theoretical framework that draws on contemporary theories of friendship, hospitality and tourism to refigure established debates around 'orientalism' for an Oceanian context.

Paul Lyons explores American-Islander relations and traces the ways in which two fundamental conceptions of Oceania have been entwined in the American imagination. On the one hand, the Pacific islands are seen as economic and geopolitical 'stepping stones', rather than ends in themselves, whilst on the other they are viewed as ends of the earth or 'cultural limits', unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity. However, both conceptions obscure not only Islander cultures, but also innovative responses to incursion. The islands instead emerge in relation to American national identity, as places for scientific discovery, soul-saving and civilizing missions, manhood-testing adventure, nuclear testing and eroticized furloughs between maritime work and warfare.

Ranging from first contact and the colonial archive through to postcolonialism and global tourism, this thought-provoking volume draws upon a wide, rewarding collection of literary works, historical and cultural scholarship, government documents and tourist literature.

1 Where “cannibalism” has been, tourism will be: Forms and functions of American Pacificism

That great sea, miscalled the Pacific

Charles Darwin, Journal of the Beagle (1832–6)

Oceania in the U.S. Imagination

Get real

We were always just stepping stones

Erich von Daniken saw the footprints of the Gods

Chris Connery saw the trademarks of capitalism

Who’s going to give a damn if they don’t

Can’t remember that the whole of the doughnut is filled

with coconuts.

Teresia Teaiwa, “Amnesia” (2000)

Since the days of the early Republic, two fundamental conceptions of Oceania – coterminous, contradictory, synergetic – have been entwined in the U.S. imagination. On the one hand, “Pacific” islands are envisioned, economically and geopolitically, not as ends in themselves, but as stepping stones (provisioning and refueling stations, colonial outposts, communication centers, military bases) or passages (shipping lane protectors) toward the wealth of the Orient and the Indies. Such a vision shaped the U.S. relation to Oceania first in the China trade, in which private interests conflated with economic nationalism, and later in colonial ventures framed in terms of geostrategic needs. On the other hand, Pacific islands are imagined as ends-of-the-earth, cultural limit-cases unencumbered by notions of sin, antitheses to the industrial worlds of economic and political modernity, whose unfamiliar natives are compared for a variety of purposes to African and Native Americans. In the stepping-stones narrative, versions of which have prevailed in U.S. policy in Oceania for over two hundred years, the islands are remote dots in the vastest of watery expanses, valued primarily for the quality and location of their harbors (Pearl, Apra, Pago Pago) and natural resources (sandalwood, guano, bêche-de-mer, pearl and pearl shell, copra) to be traded in Asia. At the same time, the islands function as places for scientific discovery, soul-saving and civilizing missions, manhood-testing adventure, nuclear testing, and eroticized furloughs between maritime work or warfare, all activities linked to U.S. subject formation and performance of national identity in gendered terms.¹

Within both of these overarching narratives the specificities of Islander histories and cultures, along with the Islanders’ political rights, are subordinated. Timothy Dwight’s “America; or, A Poem on the Settlement of the British Colonies” (1780) subordinates “savage nations” as it apostrophizes the new Republic:

1. Hail land of light and joy! thy power shall grow
2. Far as the seas, which round they regions flow;
3. Through earth’s wide realms thy glory shall extend,
4. And savage nations at thy scepter bend.
5. Around the frozen shores thy sons shall sail,
6. Or stretch their canvas to the ASIAN gale.

In “The Errand Bearers” (1860), Walt Whitman, extending Thomas Jefferson’s idea of America as an “empire for liberty,” writes similarly of “The Great Sea, the brood of islands, Polynesia, the coast beyond, / The coast you henceforth are facing – you Libertad.”² Such passages, prosopoetically figuring the U.S. as “a new Empire, grander than any before,” tend to be read today as early Republic “Orientialism” that “linked nationhood with command over the Orient” and accompanied the U.S. “race to the Orient” (Schueller 2001: 2, 23). From an Oceania-based viewpoint – one informed by the on-the-ground perspectives of Oceanians and by the continuing project of Pacific studies to become decolonized – this highlights the hold of what might be considered a repeating series of opening accounts toward Asia. In this narrative, Oceanians are bent to U.S. will, adopted as “wards of Uncle Sam” (as many popular magazines put it), and displaced to the recreational margins of the national imagination, though not without occasional liberal handwringing. What Renato Resaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia,” a way to maintain “one’s innocence and at the same time talk about what one has destroyed” (Rosaldo 1989: 70), is a prevalent half-tone in writing about Oceania, beginning in the early nineteenth century with analogies to Native Americans. “Polynesia, the dying civilization,” wrote James Michener, “haunts the minds of white men who destroyed it” (Michener 1951: 44).

The wake of this narrative, which hides complexities in the past and present, is a jumble of temporalities and spatialities constructed over the developmental narrative that underlies colonial discourse in general. As Anne McClintock argues, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “historicism,” the notion of progress depends on a background of “archaic time” against which “to identify what is historically new” (McClintock 1995: 358). Oceania is imagined at once as “Stone Age,” atavistic, or lotus-land outside Western time, and also claimed as America’s “ocean of the future.”³ According to rhetorical needs, Oceania is imagined as proximate (“The Pacific is our natural property,” wrote John La Farge, “our great coast borders it for a quarter of the world” [La Farge 1912: 278]) or distant (“strange, fantastic places over the rim of the world” [O’Brien 1922a: 7]). The developmental ideology that backs this thinking has held virtually every U.S. writer about Oceania. Whereas some authors make romantic comparisons, such as Emerson’s juxtaposition of the “thinking American” (who has lost aboriginal strength) and the hearty, “naked New Zealander” (Emerson 1982: 48), others write from overtly socially Darwinistic viewpoints, such as Jack London with his “Inevitable White Man” prevailing over hairy, “worse than naked” natives (London 1967). In “Salute du Monde,” Whitman more typically envisions Oceanians as among the “benighted” of the earth, but extends the hand of friendship to “you Feejeeman! . . . away back there where you stand, / You will come forward in due time to my side” (Whitman 1965: 148). Through this pervasive scalar model, Oceanians are seen as remnant cultures “centuries behind us in the life-struggle, the consciousness struggle” (Lawrence 1961: 137).

There is a clear connection between such deeply ingrained views and the geostrategic line that runs from Jefferson and John Quincy Adams through Teddy Roosevelt – “I wish to see the U.S. the dominant power of the Pacific Ocean” (quoted in Beale 1989: 5) – to Richard Nixon’s sense that as Europe withdrew “the remnants of empire” the U.S. became the “Pacific power . . . both our interests and our ideas propel us westward across the Pacific, not as conquerors but as partners” (quoted in Drinnon 1980: 445). From the overthrow of Hawai‘i onward rhetoric such as that of senator Albert J. Beverage became normative: “The Pacific is the Ocean of the commerce of the future. Most future wars will be conflicts for commerce. The power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world” (quoted in Fredman 1969: 36). These viewpoints ground Cold War paternalism, with its stated civilizing mission to bring “them,” however traumatically, along with “us” into civilized modernity, backing the ambition of military control. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, while much of the world was decolonizing, U.S. imperialism increased in the region with the goal of maintaining “the Pacific as an American lake free of communist influence” (Weeks 2002: 93; Meller 1968). In addition to Hawai‘i, Guam, and American Samoa, the U.S. administered large sections of Micronesia: “It will be useful for some time to come,” said Secretary of State Dean Rusk in 1967, “for American power to be able to control every wave of the Pacific” (quoted in de Riencourt 1968: 194). Along with the economic dependency that eventuates (in places such as Palau) from government military contracts, a contemporary, ongoing example of non-territorial economic-military imperialism is the U.S. bankrolling of Indonesian repressive actions in Western Papua.⁴

From the Cold War onward, such imperialistic actions have increasingly been obscured by tourism. As the U.S. broadened its military scope of operations in Oceania, state-sponsored mass touristic promotion intensified. While the U.S. tested weapons in Micronesia (1946–58), using Marshallese as unwitting participants in “human radiation experiments,” islands were promoted as antidotes to civilization, with Islanders figuring as “primitive” reflections of jaded U.S. citizens. Teresia Teaiwa has developed the term “militourism” both to describe a tourism whose stability is underwritten by military presence while the “tourist industry masks the military force behind it” (Teaiwa 1999: 252; see also Enloe 1989), and to suggest a symbiotic, gendered connection between invasive military and touristic drives, in which sites of cruelty and violence are turned into sights of voyeuristic fantasy. For instance, in discussing the genesis of the term bikini for swim wear and its links to the nuclear testing on Bikini atoll, Teaiwa argues that, “by drawing attention to a sexualized and supposedly depoliticized female body, the bikini distracts from the colonial and highly political origins of its name” (Teaiwa 1994: 87).⁵

Such competing drives behind “South Pacific” discourses serve to displace or deflect any consciousness or introspection about the political reality of ongoing U.S. colonialism in Oceania. As Haunani-Kay Trask argues, the fact that “to Americans Hawai‘i is an escape into a state of mind” is connected to “the ideology that the United States has no overseas colonies and is, in fact, the champion of self-determination the world over” (Trask 1993: 180). The double logic that the islands are imagined at once as places to be civilized and as escapes from civilization informs at all points what I describe in this book as American Pacificism. This involves the co-presence of the nationalistic stepping-stones narrative with a nostalgic, oneiric, cover story that it never displaces; rather, the two hands wash each other clean. The weave of narratives at once naturalizes and neutralizes knowledge of the effects of U.S. trajectories into Oceania.

In the dominant attitude toward Oceania, the two narratives move in alliance, with the stress always on commerce and democratic character-building. From generation to generation, Pacificist U.S. views of Oceania have had iconic public advocates – from John Ledyard to Matthew Perry to James Michener, often acting through knowledge-producing institutions, from government-sponsored expeditions to museums and think-tanks, such as the East–West Center, established during the Kennedy era for theorists and planners of the Asia-Pacific region. Knowledge production backs commercial, patriotic aspiration. In 1783, Ledyard, the iconic “American Marco Polo” who sailed with Captain Cook and later lobbied Thomas Jefferson in Paris to invest in trans-Pacific expeditions that would link the U.S. commercially to Asia, offered his narrative of Pacific travel to the public. Replete as it was with liberal philosophical asides about Islanders, his account was presented “as essentially usefull to America in general but particularly to the northern States by opening a most valuable trade across the north Pacific Ocean to China & the east Indies” (Ledyard 1963: xlv). In the mid-nineteenth century Matthew Perry forecast that “The People of America will, in some form extend their dominion and power until they have brought within their mighty embrace multitudes of the Islands of the great Pacific, and place the Saxon race upon the eastern shores of Asia” – for Perry, because this followed the will of “an over-ruling Providence,” the U.S. probably “could not, if we would . . . avert our ultimate destiny” (quoted in Perry 1994: 84–5). Writer after writer has echoed this viewpoint, as in Mark Twain’s trade-oriented description of Hawai‘i as “a half-way house on the Pacific highway” (Twain 1975b: 233). In the 1950s, University of Hawai‘i administrator William George spoke of the institution as “the central pier of a bridge, one span of which would extend from the continental United States to Hawaii, and the other span from Hawaii to the Orient” (quoted in Quigg 1986: 16). An article in Newsweek, characteristically disavowing U.S. colonialism, claimed that

Hawaii will be the first state with roots not in Europe but in Asia. This is bound to have a profound effect on America’s future in the entire Far East . . . In Asian eyes, the U.S. is the land of the white man, and all too frequently it is tarred with the brush of ‘colonialism.’ Hawaii the 50th state could change all this.

(quoted in Klein 2003: 251)

Such liberal racism vis-à-vis Oceanians is characteristic of Michener, the self-described “cultural geographer” of Asia and the Pacific during the Cold War period (Grobel 1999: 168), who, as journalist, pundit, advisor to the State Department and various corporations, and bestselling author, exercised enormous influence. While a career-long social progressive and anti-racist, Michener habitually dispels any notion of indigenous rights in promoting East–West relations. His anti-racism thus serves the colonial agenda vis-à-vis Oceanians, reflected in U.S. linguistic epistemology, which turned “lands” into “property” and “kinship” into “citizenship,” and disguised Native–Settler politics in rhetorics of multiculturalism. Through thus redefined terms of citizenship and subjecthood, as J. Kēhaulani Kauanui has demonstrated, Islanders became racially assimilable (legislated out of rights through blood-quantums), as opposed to the Asians with whom the U.S. state sought co-prosperity. Michener’s characteristic strategy in this is to approach islands from the perspective of the long view, beginning with the formation of the islands out of volcanic activity and coral polyps, a context against which all forms of settlement are first equated, and then seen as evolving along either the progressive path of democratic capitalism or the regressive path of communal ownership. Thus his vision of the adoption into the U.S. family of a “South Pacific” island (Hawai‘i, although it is in the North Pacific) with “Asian roots” dissolves U.S. colonialism in a vision of racial harmony to come, and is a clear instance of what Rob Wilson describes as “the U.S. white settler imaginary and its own grand will to democratic-commercial sublimation into itself” (Wilson 2000a: 124). Michener splits contemporary Islanders from their relation to place and history, describing Oceanian cultures as in any event dying or assimilating before “the onrush of white civilization,” in part because Islanders are outwitted and outworked by Asian settlers (Indians in Fiji, Chinese in Tahiti, Japanese in Hawai‘i) (Michener 1951: 44, 64). He envisions Polynesians as soluble within the democratic Asia-Pacific melting pot. In the blockbuster novel Hawaii (1959), this produces the ideal of “the golden man.”

For Michener, the islands were valuable as “Pacific approaches” to Asia. The “South Pacific,” he concluded in Return to Paradise, “has become the meeting ground for Asia and America. . . . There is only one sensible way to think of the Pacific Ocean today. It is the highway between Asia and America” (Michener 1951: 436). At the same time, while calling the region “a backwash in the world’s eddies,” Michener argues of Oceania that “These trivial islands have imposed on history the most lasting vision of earthly paradise” (ibid.: 45). Michener perpetuated this in the image of Bali Ha‘i, a gauzy version of Bora-Bora (where soldiers maneuvered not to be sent home), although Bali Ha‘i was the name of a “most miserable Melanesian village” in the Solomon Islands that Michener described as “filthy, unpleasant” (Michener 1992a: 91). Bali Ha‘i beckons tourists to this day: “Here I am, your special island / Come to me, come to me.” Oceanian peoples and lifeways could be little more than backdrop, or furnishers of curios (shrunken heads, grass skirts, boars’ teeth), in such a directioned narrative as South Pacific (1947), in which young Liat, “a true gem of the Orient” (Michener 1951: 183), embodies the spirit of Bali Ha‘i. In Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, and the play and movie inspired by its stories, significant exchange, economic and libidinal, must take place between U.S. agents and Asians, in particular Tonkinese (indentured labor from the Gulf of Tonkin), along with French plantation owners. Clearly, as Cristina Klein argues, this enacted “a variation of the U.S.–French– Vietnamese relationship that was being forged at the time” (Klein 2003: 167).⁶

Michener’s views were pervasive among Cold War scholars, writers, and regional planners, who shared a tendency to recall selectively the scope of nineteenth-century U.S. involvement in Oceania and to read it backwards and forwards as legacy of connection and prophecy of possession. That such a legacy required recollection suggests something of the postwar investment in reasserting the teleology of progressive U.S. Westward destiny monumentalized in such paintings as Thomas Cole’s “The Course of Empire” (1836) or Emanuel Gottlieb Luetze’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (1861). The alternative to this linear march would have been to acknowledge a multidirectional impulse toward empire from the birth of the Republic forward, or a nineteenth-century embryonic version of world-integration through multidirectioned capitalism, or what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as “a decentered . . . apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Hardt and Negri 2000: xii). The “early and extensive” (Dodge 1966: 51) U.S. commercial involvement in Oceania before the settlement of most of the continental West, from the 1790s onward, has been widely documented, but has had minimal effect on the “Westward Course of Empire” narrative, which seems as necessary to the proponents of U.S imperialism as to its critics.⁷ (In 1801, for instance, Edward Fanning describes entering a remote harbor in which he found “a small fleet of American sealers, being five ships and a schooner, from whom we learned there were upwards of thirty sail of American sealing vessels on this coast” [Fanning 1970: 306]).

In actuality, the continental West was circled and linked to world markets in part by labor from Asia and Oceania. A whole U.S.-Pacific system of commerce and settlement functioned on a broad scale throughout the region from 1812 through the Civil War around the whaling industry (along with sandalwooders, sealers, bêche-de-mer traders), involving agents, communication networks, a consular system, and state-sponsored military protection, along with the missionaries who trained Island missionaries who fanned out, spreading trade and establishing U.S. influence throughout the Islands. Long before San Francisco became a commercial center or California a U.S. state (1850), Honolulu was the business hub of Oceania: for a Honolulu resident the gold boom caused a bust in the Honolulu housing market, pulling away both settler–traders and laborers ( Judd 1966: 253). By then maritime industry centers such as Sag Harbor and New Bedford (a section of which was called “New Guinea”) had substantial communities of Oceanians. Thousands of Oceanians, comprising roughly one-fifth of the U.S. maritime (see Denoon et al. 1997; Chappell 1997), used the industry to move themselves to and from their home islands, or formed settlements in the West from what is now southern California to Alaska. Much of the U.S. “West” was settled from the “East” and the ideological foundations that would lead to the seizure of the West are connate with the ambition for transnational commercial development in and across Oceania. There was a literal sense in which a mid-nineteenth-century writer such as Thoreau could write, in The Maine Woods, “We have advanced by leaps to the Pacific, and left many a lesser Oregon and California behind” (Thoreau 1985: 655).⁸

Throughout the nineteenth century, U.S. writers drew parallels between the opening of Oceania and the settling of the West. Herman Melville most famously echoed this connection in Moby-Dick (1851), drawing analogies between the ocean and fields of wheat, while referencing Native Americans. (From Cook’s journals on, Oceanians were often referred to as Indians, a fact that resonates differently in U.S. contexts than in his own.) The sense of the applicability of challenges, policies, and principles from one frontier to the other has always been accompanied by the vision of U.S. commercial extension as ideologically distinct from European colonialisms. The U.S., according to the Monroe Doctrine, had no overseas colonial ambition, and in the course of settling the continent (rather than administering non-contiguous lands) expressed a moral obligation toward those it displaced, whose dependency, assimilation, or diminution (“vanishing”) were considered inevitable byproducts of progress. In his 1828 Letter to Congress, for instance, John Quincy Adams wrote how “appropriating to ourselves” Native-American hunting grounds had “brought upon ourselves the obligation of providing them with subsistence” (Adams 1897). The relation of Oceanians to “American Indians” was sensed acutely by Oceanian intellectuals and political leaders, from Kamakau, who wrote in 1841 that, “if we do not gather these data now, after many generations our children would be like the American Indians – a race without a history” (Kamakau 1961: iv), to Kauikeaouli (who invoked the destruction of “red skins” as a cautionary example for Oceanians), to Lili‘uokalani, who saw Hawaiians being “relegated to the condition of the aborigines of the American continent” (Lili‘uokalani 1980:...