A Reporter in Micronesia

Kahn, E. (1966). A Reporter in Micronesia. W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.

Abstract: Account of U.S. successes and failures during its twenty-year guardianship over the 2,000 islands of the Marianas, the Carolines and the Marshalls, since World War II.

In 1966, his “A Reporter in Micronesia” was published, and it was about the remote and tiny Pacific islands then administered by the U.S. through the Trust Territory government. Many of the mostly stand-alone chapters of the 303-page book appeared in The New Yorker, and they probably persuaded some Peace Corps volunteers who had read them to check out Micronesia.

“[T]here are a few people anywhere,” Kahn wrote, “who are aware [of] a sprawling entity called the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, over which, for the last twenty years, the United States…has held firm sway. Nowhere, and at no time, has America had a comparable opportunity to demonstrate how its resources, skills and techniques can be used to make an underdeveloped region become, in the contemporary phrase, emergent.”

Like the former U.S. colony in Asia, the Philippines, the TT islands were — for better or worse — re-made in America’s image. It was during the U.S. administration and under its “guidance” when the TT islands — the NMI, the present-day FSM, the Marshalls and Palau — created their current political structures. In determining their future status, islands leaders had eagerly sought and received the expert advice of U.S. government officials, educators, lawyers, economists and other professionals.

Islands leaders, moreover, were very much aware that Micronesia’s “geographical dispersion and remoteness makes every undertaking more costly, probably than in any other area of the world,” as a visiting U.N. mission stated back then. In Micronesia, Kahn wrote, the “most routine of undertakings is apt to be uncommonly challenging.”

To achieve “cohesiveness, compassion, and comprehension,” Kahn said, “the learning of English is being vigorously encouraged” by the U.S. in Micronesia. “It seems a reasonable enough proposition, inasmuch as an American veneer — albeit still a thinnish coat on many of the islands — is gradually being applied to practically all of Micronesian life.” Kahn said “quite a few of the islands remote from the district centers, and some of the centers as well, still cling resolutely to their time-honored customs…but they may all be fighting a losing battle against the American way of life.”

Like many other American who visited the islands and had to learn about the region’s history, Kahn compared the bustling Micronesian economy during the Japanese administration with what it had become under the U.S. In Koror, Palau, he said, “natives comparing the frenetic Japanese Period with the infinitely more relaxed American Period that succeeded it confess that they are unable to understand how we won the war.” Japan’s “term of occupancy is sometimes…known in Micronesia as The Concrete Period.” In contrast, the American Period was The Corrugated Tin Period.

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MAG: 621958083
CorpusID: 152418721
OpenAlex: W621958083