New book chronicles struggle of Guam’s people

HONOLULU, Hawaii—As the United States military prepares for a massive relocation of thousands of U.S Marines and their families to Guam, a new book published by the University of Hawaii Press provides needed insight into the history of the island territory.

We Fought the Navy and Won: Guam’s Quest for Democracy, by Doloris Coulter Cogan, is a carefully documented yet impassioned first-person account of Guam’s struggle to liberate itself from the absolutist rule of the U.S Navy in the years following World War II.

To mark the publication of her book, the author will be traveling from her home in Elkhart, Indiana, to visit Guam timed before the 64th anniversary celebration of Liberation Day. She will be on island for book signings and interviews, arriving July 16 and departing July 22. She will make a stopover in Honolulu from July 11 to 14 to promote her book there.

In her book, Cogan focuses on the crucial five years after Liberation Day in 1945, when the people in Guam stood up to the Navy in their desire for self-determination. Ruled by Spain for 300 years after being discovered by Magellan in 1521, then administered by an autocratic U.S. Navy for nearly 50 years after the Spanish-American War in 1898, before occupation by the Japanese, the Guamanians were ready in 1945 to throw off the yoke of colonial government.

As Cogan recounts, “Guam’s quest for democracy was a battle of words and legislation. Not one bullet was fired. Yet a seesaw battle went on for years, pitting U.S. Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal against former Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes and a Guam Assembly that eventually staged a walkout in 1949 to protest lack of civilian control.” This act of defiance drew renewed attention from the national press and prompted congressional hearings that resulted in the Organic Act of Guam signed by President Truman on Aug. 1, 1950.

Cogan chronicles these pivotal years in Guam’s history. Fresh out of the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University, she took a job as a writer and editor of the Guam Echo, a publication of the newly formed Institute of Ethnic Affairs in Washington, D.C., led by John Collier, who also championed the cause of Guamanian autonomy. Her book is based on information in the 37 issues of the Guam Echo, published from February 1945 through May 1950 and sent monthly to a broad national readership. She has since gifted complete copies of those publications to the Micronesian Area Research Center on Guam, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. to facilitate further research. In the year 2000, she was invited by the governor of Guam to participate in the 50th Anniversary of the Organic Act of Guam. It was after meeting historians there that she discovered she had a book of her own.

Cogan has written this book partly to capture the attention of the sons and daughters and grandchildren of the brave Chamorros of the 1940s. She believes her historical account also has a contemporary message: that democracy cannot be won at the point of a gun or imposed from above but must be achieved through work at the grassroots level by those to be governed; that policy at the top level can be changed; that even the military can be brought around to change by speaking truth to power, and that freedom of the press plays an important part in achieving and sustaining real democracy.

Retired and living in Elkhart, Indiana, Doloris Cogan is the mother of three grown sons and two grandsons. She has traveled widely in retirement.

We fought the Navy and Won: Guam’s Quest for Democracy retails for $24 in paperback and for $45, hardcover. Books may be ordered directly from the University of Hawaii Press, toll-free phone 1-888-847-7377, or 808-956-8255; email: uhpbooks@hawaii.edu; or online at: www.uhpress.hawaii.edu. [B][I](PR)[/I][/B]