The Brown & White Mosaic

"The performance of those fellows is a shameful and disgraceful one," said Hawaii's voteless delegate to Congress, Joseph R. Farrington, in a half sob of frustration last week. "What they're doing to us is a crime."

Next week "those fellows"--the U.S. Senate--will take up the petition by the Territory of Hawaii for admission to the union as a full-fledged state. Hawaii has been petitioning for statehood for 98 years--and from the talk in the cloakrooms, Joe Farrington knows the odds are against him again this time. Far worse, the talk in the cloakrooms is the quid pro quo talk of politics, e.g., if Hawaii is Republican, then we should let in Democratic Alaska. Joe Farrington's lament is provoked by the fact that nobody is asking the only question that matters: "What kind of place is Hawaii in the year 1952?"

The Hawaii of 1952 is a string of volcanic islands in mid-Pacific where half a million U.S. citizens are living the most spectacular story of all the incredible stories of Americanization. In the decade since the Jap attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaiians have faced a half-century's accumulated problems of transition: the breakdown of economic monopoly, the rise of aggressive labor unionism, the threat of Communist control, the restlessness of homecoming veterans, and the rights, problems and adjustments of linguistic and racial minorities. For each problem they have found, if not the answer, at least a piece of an answer. Out of the pieces, Hawaii has created a bright new mosaic of American life.

It is a startling contrast to the dog-eared picture of Hawaii which most mainlanders (including Senators) carry around in their minds. According to the cliche, Hawaii is the home of hula dancers, ukulele players and dark-skinned surf riders, the stage for potential treason from the inscrutable Oriental-American, the impregnable bastion of Pearl Harbor, and the domain of those ancient monopolists, the Big Five.

Sack Suits. Today, as before, the center of the sugar and pineapple kingdom lies between Bishop and Fort Streets in Honolulu. But the men who stride briskly in & out of the air-conditioned buildings are not proprietors in the 19th century sense; they are corporate managers.

Like their brethren in the corporate world from San Francisco to Boston, they incline toward the Brooks Brothers sack suit--and wouldn't be caught dead in an open-necked, flowered aloha shirt during business hours. Shares of all but one of the Big Five are traded on the Honolulu Stock Exchange. Between stockholders' meetings, the corporate executives manage sugar and pineapple plantations, and manage them with great skill. They compete with each other for insurance business. They still have tight control of sugar and ultimate say-so over the Matson steamship line, but dominate very little else. They lean over backward to live up to the letter of their labor contracts with Harry Bridges' International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, and pay fancy salaries for labor-relations and public-relations advisers. "Hell," snorted a plantation owner recently, "they are so damn busy at Bishop & Merchant with labor-relations meetings that they've forgotten how to raise sugar."

The Old Way. The Big Five of old were the five sugar factoring companies which controlled trade to & from the mainland, and thus were in a position to gain control over plantations, wholesaling and retailing. The most eloquent surviving spokesman for those days is Walter Dillingham, 75, the social arbiter of the islands, and owner of a controlling interest in the influential morning Honolulu Advertiser and a dozen island enterprises. Walter Dillingham and his contemporaries saw Hawaii through a prosperous paternalistic era. Their unchallenged rule was tempered by the tradewinds and the Yankee conscience imported by their forebears, the New England missionaries who came around Cape Horn in the 1820s. Dillingham opposes statehood and is regarded as an archconservative in Hawaii today, but even his view is vastly more liberal than that of the late Richard Cooke, diehard president of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association. Said Cooke in 1930: "I can see little difference between the importation of foreign laborers and the importation of jute bags from India."

Big Doubt. Old Dick Cooke's extreme view on labor is balanced today by another extreme. Harry Bridges' blanket organization of Hawaiian longshoremen, sugar and pineapple workers has the distinction of being the only Communist-led union that controls the workers in the basic industries of a large and vital area of the U.S. In a crisis, this fact could be dangerous--but the danger can be exaggerated. There is no doubt about the loyalty of the 25,000 Hawaiian I.L.W.U. workers to their union. Since 1940, Hawaiian agricultural wages have risen faster than any other agricultural wages in the world (pineapple pay has risen from 33-c- an hour to $1.16, average sugar from 39-c- to a base of 91-c-, and both now have escalator clauses). But there is a big doubt that the field workers would ever follow Bridges on a political tangent. Australian-born Harry Bridges was convicted of perjury April 10, 1950 for swearing on a naturalization petition that he never had been a Communist, has appealed the verdict (and will be deported to Australia if he loses). In Honolulu, Bridges plays the Communist international line with considerable caution.

Last fortnight he breezed into the islands to dedicate a handsome new, three-story I.L.W.U. headquarters building just a mile from the luxury hotels of Waikiki beach. "You've got a new problem," said Harry, his long neck jutting from his open-throated green and white aloha shirt. "You know, there's a board sitting in Washington whose expressed purpose is to deny you your rights. It's the Wage Stabilization Board . . . If they try to take contract gains away from you, any strike they've ever had around here will look like a pink tea . . . It's the unions [the bosses] are after. The attacks on those called Communists are a part of it . . . Well, don't think you'll escape by being a goody-goody union."

Bridges is strong in Hawaii mainly because his chunky top lieutenant, Jack Hall, is stronger. Hall personally organized the sugar and pineapple plantations during the war, saw to it that Filipinos and Japanese were installed in the hierarchy of his locals. He ran the sugar, longshoremen's and pineapple strikes which cost the islands an estimated $100 million. There is talk in the islands that Hall is restive under political restraint, might some day challenge Bridges. If he does, the plantation workers will stick with Hall.

Orthodox Step. Long before Jack Hall came along with his union, the Oriental fieldworkers of Hawaii had worked out a more orthodox route to economic self-improvement. Each wave of new laborers would serve out its contract time (three to five years) and then drift off to the cities. There they would scrimp & save to start small businesses and get their youngsters through school.

The territorial government, true to the missionary conscience, provided plantation youngsters with schooling. Says Hung Wai Ching, one of Honolulu's prospering Chinese: "Every one of us, every single Chinese or Japanese or Puerto Rican boy, got a good education. It made us Americans. It's been completely proved here that, so long as we can read anything we want and have good teachers, the end product is just as American as a boy from Virginia or Maine or Wisconsin. Now we want statehood to make us feel like full Americans. Then I'll be just as good as Walter Dillingham."

In racial origin, Hawaii's population of 460,000 (85% U.S. citizens) breaks down thus:

Japanese 40.2%

Part Hawaiian 16.9%

Caucasian 15.3%

Filipino 13.2%

Chinese 6.8%

Pure Hawaiian 2.8%

Puerto Rican 2.3%

Korean 1.6%

Others .9%

Since the war, the Chinese-Americans have risen fast. The whites sniffed a bit --but not for long--when a wealthy Chinese family broke a local taboo and moved into a Waikiki beach house once owned by the president of the Hawaiian Pineapple Co. Grudgingly or not, the Chinese are accepted as full-ranking citizens of the islands and are the most Americanized of all the Asian groups there. Chinese who can afford it now send their youngsters to the mainland to schools, just as the whites do.

The Tidal Wave. The Japanese-Americans (who carefully call themselves "Americans of Japanese ancestry," or "AJAs") came into their own in double-quick time over a strange detour. Before the war, they tended to hang together in the atmosphere of the old country: their immigrant parents kept Buddhist and Shinto shrines in the parlor, sent the youngsters to Japanese-language schools (after public school) to learn the elements of parental respect. The attack on Pearl Harbor hit Hawaii's Japanese like a tidal wave. Overnight, the Shinto shrines disappeared, the kimonos and geta (Japanese slippers) were burned, and the language schools closed. As one Japanese-American put it: "The country [Japan] we had been taught to hold in such great esteem had attacked our country."

The War Department assigned predominantly AJA units to the European front, kept them out of the Pacific war. The Japanese-American 100th Infantry Battalion came out of the Italian campaign the most decorated battalion in U.S. military history. The 3,600 AJAs in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, also in Italy, won over 5,000 individual awards, and the 442nd was accounted one of the finest combat outfits in the Army. Thousands of returning AJAs drew on the G.I. Bill of Rights to take college degrees they could not have afforded before the war.

The AJA success in politics parallels the Chinese rise in business. Last year, the AJAs counted a significant victory when 32-year-old Sakae Takahashi, a well-decorated major in the 100th Infantry Battalion, was appointed territorial treasurer. He was the first AJA ever to be taken into the governor's cabinet.

Round & Round. The automobile, symbol of 20th-century America, also stands for emancipation in the new Hawaii. The islands have relatively few paved roads, and most of them just go round & round the shoreline. Yet the Oriental-Americans, on the way up, want to ride just like the whites: in the last five years island registration has doubled. There is now one car for every three and five-sixths persons (U.S. average: one for every four and one-fifth persons).

Hawaii still has plenty of individual racial headaches, but the islands today are one of the best examples of racial relations in the world. The chief of police of Honolulu is a Chinese-Hawaiian named Danny Liu (reporters call him Charlie Chan). The perennial sheriff of Honolulu is famed old Olympic swimming champion Duke Kahanamoku, a full-blooded Hawaiian. Speaker of the territorial House is Hiram L. Fong, a wealthy Chinese-American lawyer. And a roll call of the territorial legislature counts off Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, whites and part-Hawaiians (but, as yet, none of the latecoming Filipinos).

The Gap. The real trouble in Paradise is no longer political or sociological; it is economic. The whole brown and white mosaic rests on a semicolonial economy that is strapped to agriculture, and agriculture is strapped to the hard facts about the land. The total area of the eight islands is about a third larger than Connecticut, but the workable lands are mere fringes running from the sea steeply to the rugged, volcanic mountains. Thus, for agricultural purposes, Hawaii is about the size of a small Ohio county.

This "county" produces about $230 million a year, mostly from the big sugar and pineapple crops. It has made serious efforts to develop such fringe crops as coffee, cattle, macadamia nuts, vegetables, orchids and fruit. But the income from all agriculture is still far less than the islands' annual bill of imported goods from the mainland. In early 1950, there was a flare-up of unemployment, but the Korean war brought a return of military activity, jobs for about 28,000 Hawaiian civilians, and a new warlike boom. But still the gap is ominous, and Hawaii's planners try to fill it with tourists.

High Winds. It is the tourist Hawaii that Hawaiians have done the best job of selling. The center of this tourist world is the white sand crescent of Waikiki beach, rimmed by the big hotels. Most tourists spend their time lolling in the sun--with perhaps a duty Circuit of Honolulu's island of Oahu. They visit the mid-island pass called the Pali and gaze down with ohs and ahs from its high cliff. There King Kamehameha I in 1795 won an important victory in his campaign to unite the islands by beating the defending Oahuans and forcing some of them, in wild retreat, to leap over the precipice. Most guided tours also stop for a look at Diamond Head and the starchy Victorian-style government buildings.

But too few tourists discover the really spectacular scenery of the other islands: the painted-desert colors of Kauai's Waimea canyon; the vast, gaping Crater of the Sun atop Haleakala on Maui; the hissing craters and the black sand beach on Hawaii, "the big island." Overall, the islands have the raw material to lure the tourist dollar, but Hawaii's capitalists--old & new--will have to build more hotels before they can handle enough tourists to close the gap between imports and exports.

Whether the gap is closed or not, the patterns of the new Hawaiian mosaic are not likely to be altered for the worse. The changes that have taken place in the swift decade have as much to do with the heart and spirit as with economics. Struggle ill becomes an island paradise. In a few more years, the worlds of Walter Dillingham, Jack Hall, Hiram Fong and Sakae Takahashi may relax together into the old Hawaiian custom of enjoying living.

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