Knock on the Door

(See Cover)

One September night in 1931, a doe-eyed young woman in a green evening dress, bored with a gay party at Honolulu's Aia Wai Inn, wandered outside and along John Ena Road. She was the wife of a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, and her name was Thalia Massie.

By the story she told later, five men seized her, drove her away in an auto, beat her and raped her. Five men of mixed Hawaiian and Asiatic blood were arrested and accused of the crime. When they were let out on bail, Thalia Massie's Kentucky-born, Annapolis-bred husband, with the help of Thalia's socialite mother and two enlisted men, kidnaped one of them--a massive man named Joe Kahahawai. They shot him and drained out his blood in a water-filled bathtub.

The lynch plot was discovered. Lieut. Thomas Massie and his collaborators were arrested and convicted of manslaughter --then freed after serving a sentence of one hour. The rape charges against the five men (including the murdered Kahahawai) were dropped for lack of evidence.

The Massie case was an unprecedented flare-up in Hawaiian race relations. But its melodramatic aspects awakened the first general interest that the people of the mainland U.S. had ever shown in their neglected Pacific paradise, 2,400 miles west of San Francisco's Golden Gate. The luridly revealed racial complexities of the territory became the subject of scandalized interest on the mainland, and touched off a deep national uneasiness. In the hysteria, fanned by U.S. editors playing up a gaudy story, and by the U.S. Navy, which saw its gold-buttoned dignity assailed, some U.S. newspapers even tacitly condoned the lynching of Joe Kahaha-wai.

Acid Test. Now, 15 years after the Massie case, the nation is confronted again by the problem of Hawaii's races,* and in a way which will reawaken in the U.S. Senate something of the same uneasiness aroused by the Massie affair. Hawaii is knocking at the nation's door. After almost half a century of territorial status, she wants to be admitted as the 49th state. Her aggressive spokesman is Joseph Farrington, an influential publisher, son of an immigrant from the mainland, and Hawaii's Delegate to the U.S. Congress.

The campaign has been partly successful. Last summer, with a brief discussion and a 196-to-133 vote, the House approved statehood for Hawaii. Next month the Senate will send Oregon's Guy Cordon to make another one of several congressional on-the-spot investigations. When the Senate takes a vote in its regular session next year, democracy will get an acid test. But it will be the mainland's democracy which gets the test. For Hawaii is the most democratic area under the U.S. flag.

Garden of Eden. In the travel-bureau ads, Hawaii is the Garden of Eden. As far as oceanographers are concerned, it is a well-nigh totally submerged volcanic range spread across 2,000 miles of ocean. Its economic orbit includes six chief islands, of which Kauai is furthest west. The archipelago's commercial heart is the city of Honolulu (pop. 267,000), on Oahu, which is Eden--with a touch of Indianapolis.

Last week Honolulu stores sold grass skirts, wooden roses and jade jewelry, while traffic honked around neighboring Piggly Wiggly stores and office buildings which looked as if they had been moved, stone by stone, from the Midwest.

Just as Delegate Farrington did when he was a boy, children of kamaainas (oldtimers) went off to school wearing their shoes, came home carrying them in their hands. They tobogganed down grassy slopes on ti plant leaves, frisked on palm-fringed beaches and swam in the creamy surf.

White mothers worried about their small fry picking up pidgin English--but not about their barefoot habits. A few who could afford it sent their children to high school and college on the mainland --particularly their daughters. On soft tropic nights there was too much "aloha" in the air. "I think it's safer to send them away," said one mother, "even if they do come back as frosted little snobs."

The temperature was in the 70s, as it almost always is. The bland northeast trade winds rustled everlastingly through the palms. On the famed narrow crescent of the beach at Waikiki, the malihinis (newcomers) loafed around the salmon-colored Royal Hawaiian Hotel (rates: $12 to $125 a day), the neighboring Moana, the rambling, swank Halekulani. Some lay languorously on the sand, or skinned their knees trying to ride the marching surf. The tourist business, nipped by the war, was beginning to recover.

Hotels furnished chilled ripe pineapples for the visitors, ladled out free pineapple juice, put on hula dances for amateur photographers. Every Saturday night at the Royal Hawaiian, George Kainapau, Honolulu's most popular singer, crooned in falsetto Aloha Oe (Farewell to Thee) and Ke Kali Nei An (Waiting for Thee).

The Word from Boston. The modern story of Eden began in 1778 when the British explorer, Captain James Cook, landed on the islands, first to be welcomed by the natives as a god, later to be killed in a petty melee. The natives were of trackless origin. They had no written language, but they were storytellers and great orators--large and brown, polygamous and polyandrous. They were held in durance only by the tabus and superstitions of their polytheistic religion, which they renounced in 1819 after the death of their great King Kamehameha I.

Traders and whalers followed Cook. In 1820 came Protestant missionaries from Boston, bearing printing presses, Mother Hubbard dresses, Bibles and the gospel word. A few of them and many of their friends and relatives branched out briskly into other businesses. They traded and planted sugar cane. The archipelago began to hum. The fortunes of the new enterprisers budded.

The native population, however, sadly declined. When Cook landed, there were some 300,000 natives in the archipelago. Seventy-five years later, chiefly because of the white man's diseases, their numbers had dwindled to 70,000. The islands' invaders, who had to have workers for the canefields, turned their eyes overseas for contract labor.

In 1852 the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society imported the first batch of 200 Chinese and, in the years which followed, thousands more. From Japan, docile contract labor was imported by the tens of thousands at wages of $9 a month, $6 a month for food.* From Europe, where thousands were forsaking their homelands to work in the U.S., came other shipments of labor for Hawaii. Predominantly they were Portuguese, but there were also Germans, Norwegians, Swedes, Spaniards, Poles, Russians. By 1900, more than 140,000 workers were fed into the islands' lush, green plantations.

Hawaii's immigrants came to a land dominated by the New England conscience of its enterprisers, and the new arrivals felt it. There was no card playing, "quarreling with or whipping wives . . . tittle-tattling ... or running about." Until stomachs and spirits revolted, the laborers were fed on fish and poi. One conscience-stricken director of a sugar factor described the labor system in 1859 as "only a modification of slavery, founded in deceit and maintained by force." On the mainland, abolitionists were saying harsher things of the social system at home as the country plunged toward a civil war.

The Enterprisers. In Hawaii, white enterprise had developed a group of merchants known as the Big Five. They became the builders of the islands. They began as sugar factors, indispensable agents who sold and shipped sugar, bought the supplies needed by the plantation owners, put up capital to get new growers started --and when a grower went broke, took over his plantation. The oldest of them, C. Brewer & Co., was founded in 1826. After Planter James Dole began canning pineapples in 1903, they added pineapples to their interests. Ultimately they branched into insurance, banking, merchandising, and set up the arterial lifeline to the mainland, the steamship companies.*

They did not neglect politics any more than did mainland businessmen. After the death of King Kamehameha, white advisers had helped his successors resist the encroachments of England and France. In 1893, when the reigning Queen, Liliuokalani, became too obstreperous, the white population helped overthrow Hawaii's monarchy, and established a provisional government. It was the year before Joseph Farrington's father, Wallace, arrived in Honolulu to edit a paper which later became the Advertiser.

The enterprisers promptly asked the U.S. Congress to annex the islands. Congress passed the annexation resolution in 1898 and set up a territorial administration. All citizens of Hawaii became citizens of the U.S., and the territory began paying taxes to the U.S., although it had no say in the U.S. Government.

In Honolulu rose the monuments to Big Five enterprise--the stone banks and office buildings under the shadow of the cloud-wreathed Koolau Mountains. Wallace Farrington became governor, served from 1921 to 1929. In Pearl Harbor stood the ships and sheds and cranes of the U.S. Navy--also monuments to enterprise which went unchallenged until Dec. 7, 1941.

The Rise of the Huh. History took some new turns after that. A new kind of enterpriser emerged. He was non-white or only part-white, and he came from the crazy-quilt society which had been organized to work with its hands.

Chinese and Japanese of small means banded together in huis (syndicates), pooling their resources and promoting business enterprises. A former social service worker, Hung Wai Ching, organized his friends and swung a $320,000 deal to acquire Honolulu's gaudy Lau Yee Chai nightclub. With Ruddy Tongg, one of the most successful of the new promoters. Hung has recently started Transpacific Air Lines (inter-island). Ruddy Tongg owns a printing and publishing business in Oahu and cattle ranches on Hawaii. Chin Ho, another Chinese, organized the company which purchased the Waianae sugar plantation on Oahu.

Even before the war, the Big Five no longer dominated the merchandising field. Piggly Wiggly, Sears, Roebuck and others had moved in. Now Pan American and United Air Lines finished cracking the transport monopoly once enjoyed by the Big Five's Matson steamship line. More visitors were arriving in Hawaii by air than by sea. But the Big Five still supplies most of the direction and driving power for the islands' economy.

The Word from the West Coast. Inevitably, the islands' growth and boom brought labor troubles. There had been occasional strikes of workers before the war, but none had been very effective. Compared with conditions in many a U.S. mining town, living conditions were good; the benevolently paternal Big' Five provided free housing and free medical service, the climate was salubrious. Then came Harry Bridges, the crow-beaked, fellow-traveling boss of the West Coast longshoremen, bearing another kind of gospel to Hawaii.

In 1944, Bridges signed only 900 Hawaiian workers. But two years later, some 33,000 agricultural workers had joined his ranks. In a first test of strength he struck the sugar plantations, tied them up for 79 days, almost wrecked the industry by ordering his strikers not to maintain its vital irrigation system. His victory was small: he won an 18 1/2-c--an-hour increase, to which the owners had agreed a month before the end of the strike.

Last July he tried again, in the pineapple fields. This time he lost, hands down. Hawaiian laborers, who are among the best-paid agricultural labor in the world (average wage: $8.10 a day), did not want to lose 40 to 50 days of peak seasonal employment. Bridges called the strike off after five days. The incident illustrated the paradoxical weakness in Bridges' position. He could cripple the islands' limited economy, or he could starve the islands with a longshoremen's strike. But in the process the workers would hurt themselves.

The New Gloom. The threat of Bridges' union, locally run by a well-trained leftist named Jack Hall, was certainly there, however. And although the Japanese laborers showed little evidence of revolutionary zeal, many businessmen thought they saw more than the threat of a strike; they saw Communism stalking the cane-brakes and the pineapple fields.

For those reasons, some rock-ribbed conservatives such as wealthy, 72-year-old Walter Dillingham oppose statehood. Said one of them: "In view of world uncertainties and the attempt at outside control of our local affairs, this is not the time for us to cut loose from federal control."

For the same reasons some of them take a very dubious view of statehood's energetic champion, Delegate Joseph Farrington.

Rising Star. Joe Farrington, however, is not dismayed (one of his favorite poems is Invictus).

Born during a trip his parents took to Washington, Joe is, nevertheless, a thoroughgoing Hawaiian. He went to a private Hawaiian school established for the children of missionaries and native chiefs. He won a cup for doing "most for the school."

Later he studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin, roomed with Philip La Follette, who was to become governor of the state, went to work for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and married Mary Elizabeth Pruett, a missionary's daughter whom he had courted at the university. In 1923, the Farringtons returned to Honolulu. There Joe was managing editor of the Star-Bulletin, which his father had bought. At Wallace Farrington's death, Joe became general manager and president.

One of the effects of the Massie case was to put Farrington into politics. Washington, alarmed by the demonstrated laxity of Honolulu's police, tried to usurp some of the territory's prerogatives. Farrington was made secretary of a committee which staved off such federal intrusion. On that record and on a platform advocating statehood, he ran for the territorial Senate and got elected. Hawaiians favored statehood by more than two to one in a 1940 plebiscite.

Farrington's political star continued to rise. He was elected Delegate to Congress in 1942, re-elected in 1944. Last year the election was held amidst the hysteria of the sugar strike. While almost everyone in the islands took a firm position on the strike, Farrington ordered his paper to steer a course of careful neutrality. This won him the endorsement of the C.I.O.-P.A.C., and overwhelming reelection. Some of his old business friends and his rival publisher, Lorrin Thurston of the Advertiser, have never forgiven him.

With his political success assured, Farrington returned to Washington and his duties as Delegate to Congress. There he lives in a red brick house near Rock Creek Park with his wife and their two adopted children (Beverly, 23, John, 12). He talks and thinks Hawaii, and behaves like a Hawaiian, taking three or four showers a day, changing from the skin out each time, an old Hawaiian custom.

Respectable & Mature. Last week he marshaled the arguments for statehood. Would the Senate be influenced by the nervous murmurings of conservative Hawaiian businessmen? It was hard to see how it could. The state of California, for example, also has Harry Bridges, labor unrest and a Communist menace. No one has yet suggested expelling California from the Union.

Hawaii has assets which the Senate could not overlook. She has respectability and maturity; she is no poor relation. She exported $132.6 million of goods to the U.S. in 1946 and provided a market for $227 million of mainland products. In fiscal 1947 she paid a total of $107 million in internal revenue and customs into the U.S. Treasury, while federal expenditures on Hawaii, exclusive of military expenditures, amounted to only $3.3 million. She paid more federal income tax than twelve states.

"A Foreign Land?" But in the end the argument would come down to Hawaii's racial situation. And the uneasiness which that aroused would not be confined to the Southern Senator who, thinking of anti-poll tax and anti-lynching bills, told Farrington dourly: "I know how your people would vote." The late Nicholas Murray Butler, president emeritus of Columbia University, wrote last summer: "In population, in language, and in economic life [Hawaii] is distinctly a foreign land. . . . [Its people] are not and could not be members of the United States of America in any true sense."

Such an argument angers all Hawaiians, even those who are opposed to statehood. They have never shared the mainland's or the Navy's hysteria over the Massie case. They have watched the melting together of races in their islands--a blending which has produced some extraordinarily striking women and is not limited to the lowest strata but spreads to the middle class and, occasionally, even touches the top crust. There is probably less race prejudice and discrimination in Hawaii than in any place on earth where mixed races live together.

The Gentleman from Hawaii. In the territorial Senate there are now seven Caucasians, six part-Hawaiians, one Japanese, one Chinese. In the House there are twelve Caucasians, ten Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians, five Japanese and three Chinese. Why shouldn't a U.S. Senator be of Japanese blood, Farrington demands?

White Hawaiians are convinced of the Americanism of their American-Japanese. They point to the record of the Japanese population. Before the Pearl Harbor attack and throughout the war, Naval Intelligence turned up not a single incident of sabotage. Hawaiians also point to the magnificent record in Europe of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, all of whose enlisted men and some of whose officers were Nisei, and who won, man for man, more decorations than any other Army unit in World War II.

But U.S. citizens could not soon forget the deeds of the Nisei's brothers, those other Japanese. Such contradictions in behavior left Americans in a dilemma. General MacArthur advocated statehood for Hawaii because he believed that such action would support his efforts to democratize Japan and presumably because he saw a difference between Japanese raised under the Empire and Japanese raised under a democracy.

The world's colored races would listen carefully to the Senate's debate. The U.S. had already given freedom to the Philippines and had given Puerto Rico the right to elect her own governor. This was traditional U.S. policy: to forswear imperialism and grant self-government to colonial peoples.

Hawaiians thought that they, too, were entitled to the benefits of that policy. For the U.S., then, the alternatives were Hawaiian statehood--which Alaska also would watch with interest--or Hawaiian independence. The second alternative would shock mainlanders and Hawaiians alike, and was not even seriously discussed. But one way or another, the Senate had to answer the people who were knocking at the Union's door.

*Of the territory's half million population, Caucasians--not including 32,000 Army, Navy and Air Force personnel--comprise 33.4%. The rest: Japanese, 32.4%; part-Hawaiian, 12.4%; Filipinos, 10.4% ; Chinese, 5.9% ; pure Hawaiian, 2.1% ; Koreans, 1.4% ; Puerto Rican, .8% ; all others, 1.2%.

* Chief staple: poi, a fermented paste made from taro root. "And an unseductive mixture it is," wrote Mark Twain, who nevertheless was fascinated by the native method of eating it: "The forefinger is thrust into the mess and stirred quickly around ... the head is thrown back, the finger inserted in the mouth and the delicacy stripped off and swallowed--the eye closing gently, meanwhile, in a languid sort of ecstasy."

* The Big Five, which have gone through a number of changes in ownership, now are: Alexander & Baldwin, Ltd. (founded by two missionaries' sons); C. Brewer & Co., Ltd. (founded by a New England trader, James Hunnewell); Theo. H. Davies & Co., Ltd. (founded by Theophilus Davies, of England); American Factors, Ltd. (founded by Captain Henry Hackfeld of Germany); and Castle & Cooke, Ltd. (founded by missionaries).

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