SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE PACIFIC ISLANDS
Direct American involvement in Southeast Asia, with the exception
of the Philippines, was limited until the end of World War I.
Nonetheless, the Library holds some fascinating collections of
Southeast Asian and South Pacific material that predate the war.
In 1934, the Fahnestock brothers, Bruce and Sheridan, set sail
from New York for China and the South Pacific on their ship, Director. The
three year voyage, during which they studied the cultures of
the Pacific and uncovered a set of important Fijian petroglyphs,
the Ndakunimba Stones, was documented in their book, Stars
to Windward (1938). During a second sailing expedition in
1940, the Fahnestocks made extensive recordings of music from
American Samoa, Fiji, French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Australia
before their ship hit a reef near Australia and sank.
A third voyage in 1941, as war loomed in the Pacific, resulted
in rare recordings of music on the islands of Indonesia, including
Bali, Madura, and the Kangean islands. This third expedition
also had a covert side. At the request of President Franklin
D. Roosevelt, the Fahnestocks evaluated Dutch military preparations
on Java and carried out several other missions. With the outbreak
of war, the Fahnestocks joined the U.S. Army's Small Ships Section
in New Guinea, the unit that inspired the 1960s television series
entitled The Wackiest Ship in the Army. In 1986, Margaret
Fahnestock Lewis, the widow of Sheridan Fahnestock, gave the
Library much of the material the brothers had collected on their
three expeditions. The Library's Archive of Folk Culture is the
home for the Fahnestock South Seas collection, including recorded
music of the South Pacific and Indonesia, recordings of Fijian
legends, manuscripts, logs, correspondence, and photographs.
Another important collection of material on the cultures of
the South Pacific and Indonesia may be found in the Manuscript
Division where the papers of the renowned American anthropologist
Margaret Mead are kept. Mead's academic career began with the
field trip to the South Pacific in 1925 that resulted in the
publication of Coming of Age in Samoa, a book that attracted
a readership well beyond the academic community. During a career
that spanned some fifty years, Mead's field work took her from
Fiji to the Admiralty Islands, New Guinea, and Bali. Her fame
and her sometimes controversial views on subjects, such as the
rearing of children, stimulated public interest in the field
of anthropology. Mead's papers in the Library are a valuable
source for research on her work and life.
The Archive of Folk Culture holds other rare Asian material,
including the Benjamin Ives Gilman collection of wax cylinder
recordings made at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago
and including Javanese and South Pacific music. The Hornbostel
Demonstration collection of 120 pressed cylinder copies from
wax field recordings includes Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian,
and Indian music recorded in the early years of the twentieth
century. In addition, the Archive of Folk Culture holds many
more recent recordings of music from Asia and the Pacific.
During World War II, the United States supported the anti-Japanese
resistance movement in Thailand, the Free Thai Movement. The
American largely responsible for bringing about this relationship
was Dr. Kenneth Landon, a former Presbyterian minister who had
spent ten years in Thailand as a missionary. After his return
to the United States in 1937, Landon worked on a Ph.D. and wrote
a book on Thai politics. With the outbreak of war, he became
Washington's leading expert on Thailand, first with America's
wartime intelligence organization, the Office of Strategic Services,
and then with the Department of State. Dr. Landon later donated
hundreds of pages of transcripts of Free Thai radio broadcasts
to the Library, along with a small but important collection of
post-World War II Thai books on politics as well as Thai political
fiction.
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Seni and Kukrit Pramoj, The King of
Siam Speaks. Most Thai were shocked by the portrayal
of their revered nineteenth-century king, Mongkut, in
the musical The King and I. The stage and screen
versions were based on Margaret Landon's 1944 book entitled Anna
and the King of Siam. To correct the record, well-known
Thai intellectuals Seni and Kukrit Pramoj wrote this
account in 1948. The Pramoj brothers sent their manuscript
to the American politician and diplomat Abbot Low Moffat,
who drew on it for his biography entitled Mongkut
the King of Siam (1961). Moffat donated the Pramoj
manuscript to the Library in 1961. (Southeast Asian
Collection, Asian Division)
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Landon's connection with the Library of Congress, however, began
before his donation of the Free Thai material, going back to
research by his wife, Margaret, for her book entitled Anna
and the King of Siam. Published in 1944, the book was an
account of the English governess Anna Leonowens's experiences
in the court of King Mongkut (Rama IV) and became the inspiration
for the Broadway musical The King and I. In her note
at the end of the book, Margaret Landon thanks Dr. Horace Poleman
of the Library of Congress for making available material for
reconstructing some of the historical background in the book.
Specifically, she cites her use of a Thai-language book in the
Library containing King Mongkut's correspondence.
With the beginning of the Cold War, the Library's collection
efforts increased to meet the need for more knowledge about Southeast
Asia. Growing concern about Asian Communism can be seen in the
increasing number of titles the Library received from Southeast
Asia during the late 1940s and 1950s, such as a 1952 report on
the Philippine Communist Party published by the Philippine House
of Representatives and publications from the Saigon-based Asian
People's Anti-Communist League and the Bangkok headquarters of
the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).
Today the Library's Jakarta Field Office is responsible for
the acquisition of publications from the region. Through dealers
in most Southeast Asian capitals and periodic buying trips, the
Jakarta Field Office ensures a continual flow of current publications
to the Library. Contemporary holdings in the languages of Southeast
Asia reflect the full range of publications available in the
region. Through its acquisitions office in Manila, the Library
has continued to expand its Philippine collection. Current holdings
of Philippine-government publications may be the largest outside
the Philippines. With the opening of an office in the U.S. Embassy
in Bangkok, the Library's Thai collection has become second only
to the collections in the major libraries in Thailand itself.
The collection is strong in the areas of politics, economics,
and regional Thai publications. The Jakarta Field Office also
implements a project to microfilm and microfiche material from
the region.
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Jajak MD, Biografi. Presiden dan Vakil,
Presiden Republik Indonesia: 1945-Sekarang. Containing
the biographies of the presidents and vice-presidents
of Indonesia since independence, this book is an example
of a recent publication in modern Indonesian. During
the colonial period, the Dutch helped popularize the
use of the Malay language throughout Indonesia's over
three thousand islands. This language later evolved into "Bahasa
Indonesia," and the roman script became the official
writing system. Indonesia's first two presidents, Sukarno
and Suharto, appear on the cover. (Southeast Asian
Collection, Asian Division)
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Publications from the countries of Indochina are part of the
responsibility of the Jakarta office and deserve special mention
here because of America's intense military and political involvement
in the area from the 1950s to 1975 and because of the large number
of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Lao who have entered the fabric
of American society since the end of the war.
The Library stepped up its acquisition of French-language publications
from Indochina in the late 1940s. By the early 1950s, the Library
was receiving four Vietnamese-language newspapers: two from
Hanoi and two from Saigon. Signs of growing interest in Vietnamese
internal politics were in evidence, such as the Library's acquisition
of an intriguing book on Vietnam's Cao Dài religion, published
in 1950 under the auspices of the Commander-in-Chief of the Cao
Dài Army and Saigon's then-Minister of Armed Forces, Maj.
Gen. Tran Quang Vinh. The Library holds copies of reports on
government and administrative reform in South Vietnam from Michigan
State University's "Vietnam Advisory Group." Despite this increasing
attention, Vietnamese-language material continued to grow more
slowly than other Southeast Asian-language publications in the
1950s, ranking well behind material published in Indonesia, Thailand,
and Burma. Even in the mid-1960s, with American involvement escalating,
the Library complained of the irregular flow of published material
from South Vietnam and the difficulty of getting publications
from North Vietnam. Nonetheless, in spite of the hostilities
between North Vietnam and the United States, the Library had
by the late 1960s begun to develop a close working relationship
with selected institutions in Hanoi. As a result of these exchanges,
the Library's collection of works from the northern provinces
of Vietnam is stronger than that from the former Saigon government.
America's war in Vietnam is often said to be the first televised
war. An extensive record of this coverage can be found in the
Library's Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division.
Included are special reports that appeared on ABC, CBS, and NBC;
historic footage from Nippon News covering the Japanese occupation
during World War II; travelogues on French Indochina produced
in the late 1940s; and a French film collection on the colonial
period with perspectives from the Viet Minh and Ho Chi Minh,
and some scenes from 1901.
Another interesting source of material on the war is found in
the Documents Division, which holds the notes and records of
Neil Sheehan, author of A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann
and America in Vietnam.
Following the end of the war in 1975 and the arrival of hundreds
of thousands of refugees from Indochina, the Library began to
see a large increase in demand for publications in the languages
of the region. With all of Vietnam now under Hanoi's control,
however, it took some effort for the Library to rebuild sources
of supply for Vietnamese publications. Today the Asian Division's
holdings in Vietnamese include some seventy-five newspapers,
about half published in Vietnam and the rest published by the
overseas Vietnamese community. The Asian Division receives 247
Vietnamese periodicals, over half published in Vietnam, and a
broad selection of fiction and nonfiction published in Vietnam.
While the Library maintains an excellent exchange relationship
with the National Library of Vietnam, it has a special project
with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Hanoi,
collecting unique law and other publications that could not be
obtained in the past. As a result, the Library's post-1975 Vietnamese
collection is the premier collection outside Vietnam.
The other languages of Indochina are represented by small but
growing collections in Khmer and Lao. Beginning in the 1970s,
the Library began to develop its Lao and Khmer collections, including
a unique set of publications in Cambodian from refugee camps
on the Thai-Cambodian border. The Library holds a small but growing
retrospective collection of publications from the Lao Patriotic
Front (Neo Lao Hak Sat), which provided the leadership for the
post-1975 Lao government. The collections are most heavily used
by former residents of Indochina, primarily scholars and Buddhist
monks. Much of the published material in the lesser-known languages
of mainland Southeast Asia is being put on microfilm or microfiche.
Other divisions in the Library hold material. The Motion Picture,
Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division has materials on several
Lao minority groups, such as the Khammu and Hmong, as part of
the Indochina Archives Project of the Social Science Research
Council. The diaries of Souvanna Phouma, former Prime Minister
of Laos, can be found in the Manuscript Division.
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