Bingham on Brownskins

The rangy, steel-grey, 52-year-old junior Senator from Connecticut, Hiram Bingham of New Haven, who styles himself "explorer"* sooner than "politician" and who is more professor* than publicist, returned to the U. S. some weeks ago from an extended tour of the Orient. On his way back from war-ridden Tientsin, he visited his birthplace, Honolulu.

Delayed correspondence last week told of Explorer-Senator Bingham's behavior on the August evening that he dined with Governor Wallace Rider Farrington and a distinguished gathering at Washington Place, the governor's mansion.

Called upon to speak, Mr. Bingham arose and, with a glint in his grey eye, said: "I am, I believe, the only American representative of government who has ever refused to enter the doors of the Army & Navy Club in Manila."

It was a provocative beginning. Nowhere is a good story better appreciated than in isolated Hawaii; no topic is more popular in Hawaii than anything pertaining to the behavior of those still further removed colonists, the white U. S. citizens of the Philippines.

Mr. Bingham's audience was all attention as he proceeded to relate how, a few weeks previously, he had been invited as guest of honor to a banquet in the Army & Navy Club of Manila. Mr. Bingham had asked whether outstanding native politicians, such as President Manuel Quezon of the Philipine Senate or Senator Sergio Osmena, independence leader, would be present.

"Certainly not," snorted the Army & Navy Club of Manila, and proceeded to instruct Mr. Bingham that no Filipinos (except, of course, servants) were admitted within the doors of the Army & Navy Club of Manila.

"Then I am sorry, gentlemen," Mr. Bingham said he replied, "but I shall not be able to accept your invitation."

The company around Governor Farrington's table frowned approvingly and felt sure that no such contretemps could possibly occur in Hawaii. They nodded sagely as Mr. Bingham said: "I want to tell you right now that if a half-dozen of the prominent white people of Manila were to invite a few of the cultured and prominent Filipinos to be their guests at a tea, the agitation for Philippine independence would die right then and there."

They frowned still more approvingly and said, "Ah!" and "Oh!" and "Not really!" as Mr. Bingham continued to cite incidents of his trip to illustrate what he denounced as the snobbery, discourtesy, superciliousness, selfishness, greed, hypocrisy and effrontery of many a white missionary, military and business man in the Orient. He told of a Chinese graduate of Yale who was cursed like a coolie by a Shanghai bank clerk; of signs in a park on Chinese soil: "No Chinamen or dogs allowed." He flayed the whites, British and U. S. alike, who commit and permit such arrogance. He roused Governor Farrington's dinner party to his own white heat of indignation and then, suddenly, blazed out: "There's beginning to be too much of that kind of thing right here!"

The speaker hesitated. Perhaps the self-consciously fixed stare of a banker across the table brought Mr. Bingham back to earth. Hesitation lengthened into a pause which Mr. Bingham ended with half a cough and half a chuckle. He had talked half an hour, he said, and would now stop.

But the company, the embarrassed banker as loud as any, begged him not to stop now; to go on and tell his white brothers how they should behave towards men with brown skins. They made Mr. Bingham go on for another half hour, nodding, ejaculating, thanking, congratulating him at the end; nodding and ejaculating anew when, as he thanked some brown-skinned girls for their singing, Hiram Bingham said he was glad that brown Hawaii had not, like the white U. S., had to go to Africa for jazz.

* By virtue of many an expedition through interior South America between 1906 and 1915.

* Between 1905 and 1924 he taught history and politics at Princeton; history and geography at Yale; diplomatic history at Johns Hopkins.