IN May 1971, the New York Times reported that “Micronesian nationalists” were accusing the U.S. of planning to keep their islands. The Times was referring to the Micronesian islands that the U.S. had seized from Japan during World War II: the Marianas (NMI), the Marshalls, Palau, Ponape (Pohnpei), Truk (Chuuk) and Yap. Since 1947, they were known as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands which the U.S. administered “on behalf of the United Nations.”
According to the Times, Micronesian nationalists were distributing copies of the Solomon Report that was submitted to the White House in 1963. They said the report’s main recommendation was to make “the strategic Central Pacific Islands of Micronesia a permanent American possession in spite of opposition expected in the United Nations.”
The Times also noted that the “2,141 islands and atolls of Micronesia” had “a total land area of only 720 square miles” but were “sprinkled over an expanse of sea larger than the continental United States…. Their geographical position astride the sea routes to the western and southwestern Pacific gives the islands strategic importance.” Moreover, the islands had “been described as a possible new United States defense frontier in the Western Pacific if American forces are pulled out of Asia.”
The U.S. was supposed to guide the islanders toward eventual independence or self-government, the Times reported, but “the document said to be the suppressed part of the Solomon Report suggests ways of insuring that the islanders would vote in a plebiscite for permanent affiliation with the United States.”
The report was written by a group of U.S. experts headed by economist Anthony M. Solomon who had a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and master’s and doctorate degrees from Harvard. He would later serve as undersecretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs during the Carter administration, and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
In May 1963, President John F. Kennedy designated Solomon to head a mission to the Trust Territory. Solomon’s primary task was to investigate and make recommendations. Earlier that year, a National Security Council staffer who had visited the TT informed the White House that the situation there was “truly appalling,” and the economy was “disintegrating.” (My source is the superb book “National Security and Self-Determination: United States Policy in Micronesia [1961-1972]” by Deanne C. Siemer and Howard P. Willens)
But Solomon’s “instruction carried a most important caveat — he ‘had to understand, accept and not challenge,’ the military and national defense imperative that the United States be able to deny foreign powers any military involvement in the Trust Territory.”
Solomon’s team spent six weeks in the TT. He and his team members visited each of the six districts and made “an enormous effort to get representative views” and “not simply talk with the leadership in each area.” One of the team members, a Syracuse University professor who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard, “took a boat, with a young boy who did not speak English as his guide, to visit a priest who lived on a virtually uninhabited island — an experience that drove home the difficulty of discussing the future of Micronesia under circumstances such that it seemed not to have much relevance to the daily lives of the people.”
In an interview with Howard P. Willens in Nov.1993, NMI author, educator and historian Samuel F. McPhetres said the Solomon Report “never became official policy.” He said it was “an excellent study of the economic situation, one of the best analyses of the economic potential of what was in the Trust Territory I’ve ever seen,” but the U.S. government “made one major mistake with the Solomon Report. They should never have classified it. That fact by itself put a stamp of mystery on it… So that everything that’s wrong is because of the Solomon Report…. The fact that it was classified ruined it.”
Some of the report’s findings, to be sure, were not flattering to the U.S. which at the time had to fend off accusations of “colonial mismanagement” that were occasionally lobbed by the Soviet Union at the United Nations.
Among the report’s findings:
• The per capita income of the islanders in 1963 was little over one-third of what it had been in 1939 under the Japanese.
“For a variety of reasons,” the report stated, “in the almost twenty years of U.S. control, physical facilities have further deteriorated in many areas, the economy has remained relative dormant and in many ways retrogressed while progress toward social development has been slow. The people remain largely illiterate and inadequately unprepared to participate in political commercial and other activities of more than a rudimentary character…. As a result, criticism of the trusteeship has been growing in the U.N. and the U.S. press — and…among Micronesians.”
Because “Micronesia is said to be essential to the U.S. for security reasons…[w]e cannot give the area up, yet time is running out for the U.S. in the sense that we will soon be the only nation left administering a trust territory. The time could come…when the pressure in the U.N. for a settlement of the status of Micronesia could become more than embarrassing.”
• There was also “too much government” in the Trust Territory. More than 95% of the TT government was financed by the U.S., but a large part of that funding was spent “on high salaries” for U.S. personnel. There were also “numerous complaints about, and dissatisfaction with the competence of the Trust Territory government….” In addition, the “very multiplicity of local government levels is beginning to cause problems, particularly at the municipal level where there is much dissatisfaction because of the realization that, in a large majority of cases, the ‘U.S. imposed’ municipal taxes produce only enough revenue to pay salaries to municipal officials and councilmen for making decisions that the village elders previously made free as a public service….”
However, the report added, “there is little desire for independence in the Trust Territory…. [E]ven if a plebiscite were held today…the total vote for independence would probably be only from 2 to 5 percent.”
As for the NMI, McPhetres said since 1947, local leaders had been adopting resolutions that were submitted to the U.N. stating that they wanted to be part of the U.S. Affiliation with the U.S. was “not something that came out of the blue” in the NMI in 1969. “It’s something that has been brewing over since the Americans took over the islands from the Japanese,” McPhetres told Willens.
“What do you think fostered the final decision of the United States to acquiesce in this request?” Willens asked.
“Because we wanted Tinian so bad we could taste it. And the Marianas people said, okay, sure. All you have to do is sign off on the dotted line. We’ll give it to you.”
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The flag of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.
