REVOLT IN PARADISE
THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION
IN HAWAII AFTER PEARL HARBOR
By ALEXANDER MACDONALD
{Submitted to Genealogy Trails by Christine Walters}
NEW YORK STEPHEN DAYE, INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1944, BY STEPHEN DAYE, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE NORWOOD PRESS NORWOOD, MASS.
FOREWORD
In all the world there's no lovelier place to live than the islands of Hawaii.
It may seem strange to have read this, when you have begun the pages which follow; for the story they tell is an ugly one. But it is not the story of the physical charms
of Hawaii. That Aloha Gel has been written by more gracious writers, many hundreds of them. This is an attempt to tell about the men of Hawaii and to describe the
incredible conflict which, under a cloak of tropic calm, has been taking place among them. It is told now because their struggle has reached a turning point. The suddenness of the impact of war was enough to set long-smoldering elements of conflict into violent motion. And now a new order is being established in Hawaii, replacing the old system of polite tyranny which ruled the Islands for more that a century.
The handful of men whose word hitherto had been almighty in Hawaii may seem to emerge out of the following pages as ogres full-blown, evil men without scruple.
That is not their nature. Almost without exception, the autocrats who ruled Hawaii are men with a highly inbred sense of righteousness. They are men with too deeply inherent a conscience to depart one iota from their code. But that, precisely, was the key to their wickedness.
It was this code and the ruthless manner in which they enforced it that made of Hawaii a community in chains.
The code was harsh and on the surface it was outdated. At first glance it seemed to be a remnant of the fire and brimstone fervor with which the missionary forebears of these autocrats ruled the Islands after their arrival in 1820. Missionary descendants kept their tight grip on the island community because they had discovered it was something worth holding on to. Destiny had passed their role on to them, and their task was a holy one which kept them tremendously rich.
So, by the Twentieth Century, there was more than religious zeal behind their code. Something very ominous had been added. It was something which reached out and vitally influenced the lives of every one of Hawaii's half-million people; it had become a coldly-calculated system of political, economic, and social control. What they had developed in these lush tropic surroundings was a near perfect blueprint for no, not merely for fascism; it was more deceptive, yet more inclusive than that. It was a process of rule by the few so foreign to democracy that it will seem incredible for it to have survived so long under the American flag.
This book is an inspection of that process; it is an informal study report of the methods by which a tiny minorty can almost completely dictate the individual lives of
the mass. Unwittingly, Hawaii lent herself as an ideal laboratory for such a study. Her natural isolation set her enough apart for a detached, clinical examination. Yet she
was cosmopolitan enough so that it could not be argued that her unhealthy condition sprang from some single cultural heritage.
That is what gives the study meaning. This was no rare hot-house variety of the rule-by-the-few system. It was one cultivated specifically as a species Americanus. It was raised to thrive on American soil. The tools so skillfully used were modern and scientific ones. The process, as it was so nearly perfected in Hawaii, was one which might readily have been transplanted to any section, or to all, of America.
That may sound like a warning, as though this were something which could threaten the whole nation. It is meant to be exactly that. What had taken place in Hawaii
was not so isolated, after all. This was something which could challenge the people of any American community. What is important is that, should their rights be similarly
usurped, they be ready to recognize this usurpation and should know how to deal with it.
The pages which follow tell what Hawaii did, and still is doing, to throw off the yoke. They were written with the conviction that Hawaii has already won her victory.
This record, therefore, is a kind of guidebook for community action. It is presented, not with the purpose of indicting the men, living and dead, who ruled the Islands,
but with the hope that those who cherish the ideals of democracy may find some profit in the lessons that the people of Hawaii have been learning.
THIS WAS HAWAII
"Ko luna e iho ana Halo, ko lalo e pit ana iluna?
"It is prophesied that the rulers will come down,
the commoners go up."
Old Hawaiian Proverb.
Had any one of the Japanese pilots who flew in over Oahu on
December 7, 1941, been of a philosophic turn of mind, he might have reflected
upon the beauty of the
island and the swift metamorphosis he and his bombing mates were about to effect
on the peaceful Sunday scene below. He might have had an eye that morning for
the
green surf which moved in sparkling, regimented lines across the coral reefs. Or
for the slim coco palms, thoughtfully spaced, which waved in the north-northeast
trades. Perhaps he noticed how everything, from the beaches across the plains to
the backdrop of mountains, was the same discreet shade of green. He might have
sensed the pleasant early morning haze that hung over all. He might even have
sighed a bit as he raced on to Pearl Harbor.
The probability is not so far-fetched as it seems. The
physical charm of Hawaii and that morning it was more than living up to the
superlatives of the tourist advertisements has just such a talent for unhinging
purpose, for subtle hypnosis. It was that siren stuff to which the Hawaii
Tourist Bureau used to expose prospective vacationers. "Sail the ocean trails to
fair Hawaii!" . . . "Forget the world's cares in the sun-kissed surf at
Waikiki". . . "Dance under the stars at the Royal Hawaiian.". . .
Blandishments like these lured visitors to Hawaii.
Surprisingly enough, they usually found the island had not sold them short. The
average vacationer started back for
his home town dreaming of Polynesian songs, the waves of Waikiki, moonlit coco
palms. . . . Hawaiian charm was a pleasant-taking drug that dulled the tourists'
senses to the fact that all was not quite well in the Islands. Even long-time
residents did not escape that magic. Most of them were hardly aware that,
beneath this surface haze of charm, a boiling was going on in this "melting-pot
of the Pacific" more potent than the fires of the volcanoes. By Pearl Harbor it
was ready to bubble over.
This struggle which the Islands fairly successfully shielded
from visitors and from the eyes and ears of continental America, was no family
squabble. It was, and is, a
clash of forces whose outcome will decide if this abundant territory is in
actuality to become a part of democratic America, or if it is to continue on its
way as a tough little oligarchy flying the American flag. It is a strange
struggle to be taking place on American soil, for the issue at stake is one in
fact, the only one for which Americans have gone to war: Freedom of the
individual.
For nearly a century there had been no true freedom for the
individual in languorous Hawaii. Save for a small, top-drawer group of
autocrats, the economy of the individual was almost completely governed by a
special type of tyranny. This may seem too harsh a word, but it is the only one
to describe a system of control which governed not only individual economy, but
reached also into nearly every other sphere of individual life in the Islands.
This strangle-hold on a community of a half-million people
did not come by any overt act of aggression. It came rather by accumulation and
by heritage. It began with the remarkable industry of the first Americans who
came to Hawaii a century and a half ago. The pioneers were missionaries but they
were, also, men who knew a good thing when they saw it.
These hardy New Englanders had not been long in the islands
before some of them turned from evangelizing to staking out claims upon the
resources of Hawaii. When
they did, they went at the job scientifically. They asked themselves some
questions.
"In a field so fruitful as this, what industry had we best choose?"
"What, of all the crops we might raise, will yield the biggest cash return?"
After a few years of experimentation, of careful elimination,
they made their decision. It was sugar. By another generation, nearly every
arable acre was grown with cane. They just didn't leave room for competition.
The few sugar planters at the top of the industry soon became
the feudal barons of Hawaii. Down at the bottom of the social structure were
their laborers Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese and Filipino immigrants brought
over in recruiting ships. Bound to the plantations by penal labor contracts,
their social rating could be described as somewhere between serf and slave.
Midway in the scale were white collar workers and owners of small businesses.
But the businesses had to be small. If any business was attractive enough the
plantation owners saw that it was financed with sugar money. Profits from the
plantations took care of all big business.
They financed the steamship lines which brought food and
supplies to Hawaii and took sugar back, began each of the public utilities, and
bought up any enterprise which, in other hands, might challenge their monopoly
control. Over a period of a century, by a process of inter-marriage and
inheritance, this control was zealously kept within a restricted circle of
families descended largely from the original missionary pioneers. However, an
industrious "outsider" who rose to an eminent enough executive position with one
of the island firms, was sometimes favored with the hand of an eligible daughter
of one of the established families. Then he moved into the charmed circle.
But tight-fisted control did not come without occasional
struggles. Some of these were of major consequence. Just before the turn of the
century, the sugar interests toppled over the throne of the kingdom of Hawaii
because the native monarchs were meddling in state affairs which breathed too
hotly on their economy. Hawaii strove to become a Territory of the United States
when it did, largely because it was the best thing for sugar. When feudal rule
was threatened by a plan for a commission form of government, and when Congress
later proposed that a Mainland governor be sent to snap the whip over the
islands, it was the sugar leaders who rose to their fullest fury and fought down
the challenges.
The most serious challenge, however, came in recent years,
and it came from within. Some segments of Hawaii finally seemed to be getting
stalwart enough to slip out of the stranglehold of sugar. Into the base of the
feudal structure several strong forces had been added. Men in the middle classes
began to take a more vital part in island industry and finance. New blood
arrived from the Mainland; there were some new leaders who recognized a bit of
autocracy when they saw it. Island labor, prodded by organizers from the West
Coast, began to flex its muscles. New capital, that literally had to be smuggled
into the territory, bought into local business. From far-off Washington the New
Deal bitterest gall of all to take forced a few social reforms into the feudal
design. And the Army and Navy, whose encroachments had from the first been
bitterly resented, began to demand more and more concessions for their
sugar-coated fortress.
As these new forces began to test their strength, sugar
answered by tightening its grip in its somewhat disarming way. Even in their
wickedest moments, the Islands' paternal rulers reasoned always that what they
were doing was for the best interests of Hawaii Nei. Semi-benevolent in public
deeds, they saw themselves as waging a constant crusade against Labor,
Foreigners and the Military all archenemies of the people of Hawaii. Destiny had
selected them for this role.
But whatever moral suasion was behind it, their system did
not lack any of the refinements which go into well-planned rule by "hidden"
government. To the task of
controlling the community they applied much the same spirit of scientific
thoroughness which had gone into the task of building up island industry. They
saw that a deciding financial, personal or moral influence was brought to
bear on every instrument moulding or expressing public opinion in the territory
on politics, the press, radio, the schools, social agencies, even the churches.
Considerable time, money and effort had gone into preparing these institutions
for a defense of their regime. So there was little prospect that the vested
interests would let their sugar kingdom melt away without an until death
struggle. And they pulled no punches in striking out at their enemies. Labor
espionage, politics by intimidation, Gestapo police methods, cut-throat business
methods, and browbeating of the press became accepted strategical operations.
Labor, in turn, began to hit back harder. Foreign capital
moved in more boldly. The Army and Navy, fortified with their first liberal
appropriations, began to sweep everything before them as they moved into
billion-dollar-scale production.
Caught in this snarl of interests was still another highly
questionable faction the Japanese. Composing a third of the Territory's
population, they were watched resentfully
by island industry because so many of them had drifted away from the plantations
into little trades and businesses of their own, because they were making their
voices heard more and more loudly in island politics, and because and this hurt
most of all the planters had only themselves to blame for the crucial Japanese
problem. It was the planters, and they alone, who had opened the Pandora's box
of Japanese immigration. Now they squirmed as they felt the eyes of all America
turned on their Hawaii, openly questioning the presence of 159,000 potential
enemies within the fortress of the Pacific.
Even more distrustful of these Japanese were the Army and
Navy officers stationed in Hawaii. They had little doubt that America's next war
was going to be with Japan, so Hawaii's Japanese problem for them was tactical,
rather than political. Now, with war on the threshold, they could denounce
Hawaii for so bitterly opposing the earlier plans for government by military
commission. That system, they grimly noted, would have long before settled the
question of the island Japanese.
Such was the tense state of affairs in Hawaii before Pearl
Harbor. While our strategists were considering the strengths and weaknesses of
this island bastion as the key
to the whole U. S. system of defense in the Pacific, the Islands themselves were
smoldering with private little sessions of internecine strife.
By 1941, the "melting-pot" was bubbling high.
When the explosion came on December 9th, a great deal more
than the ships and docks and airfields on Oahu were blown to kingdom come. The
Japanese bombs did what otherwise might have taken years of economic and social
evolution in the doing. On that eventful Sunday morning, they wrecked Hawaii's
whole feudal structure.
The effect came indirectly, of course. Specifically, the
collapse of the century-old system came when martial law put the military in
complete control of Hawaii. On top of that the Army took over from the sugar
companies their whole fleet of ships. Army provost marshals replaced civilian
judges in the island courts. The Army and Navy sat down at the controls of
island communications and gave every public utility a good combing over. They
censored the radio and the press. There wasn't a large scale activity which was
not in some way affected.
The discomfiture of the traditional island leaders gave fresh
heart to labor. Soon after Pearl Harbor new unions began to blossom, new demands
for wages were made and met. The grip that the big companies held on everything
imported into the Islands was made to loosen, as federal agencies took over food
control, fixed consumer prices and decided what goods could be bought and sold.
Thousands upon thousands of civilian workers executives,
skilled tradesmen, laborers poured into the Islands, already signed up for
defense projects. Within a year these new residents were entitled to Hawaii
votes. The smoothly regulated city and county and territorial politics were due
for an upset.
This was revolution; there could be no other name for it. In
few other chapters of American history has revolution come so definitely and so
swiftly.
After two years of war, Hawaii was still in the throes of its
revolution. There were no sure signs yet as to what final course it would take
but one thing was certain: the military was in the driver's seat. But would the
military continue to hold the reins until the war was over and afterwards?
Would island labor be able to consolidate their wartime gains
and hold on permanently to the powers they had wrested from their masters?
Would real leaders emerge out of the new "immigrant"
population?
Would the old order be able to make a post-war comeback?
What about the Territory's Japanese?
These are questions which are bound to become more and more
the concern of all America, as U. S. forces push westward in the Pacific. With
the fighting done Hawaii would still be sitting strategically there, dominating
an area whose control might well swing the balance of American influence in the
post-war world.
BEGINNINGS OF
FEUDALISM
"The foreigners are creeping in among the natives, getting
their largest and best lands, water privileges, building lots, etc. . . .
Honolulu never looked so green and pleasant. . . . Our large plain of sand is
now covered with vegetation and is laid out into lots. I am proposing, ere long,
to purchase some of them. . . ."
Letter of Amos Starr Cooke, Missionary
to Hawaii, June 3, 1851.
The harshest critic of the manner in which Hawaii's ruling
families came into power would not outrightly charge that the motive which
steered the first shipload of
missionaries to the Islands was worldly gain. Rather, he would point out that
there were fourteen mission bands altogether sent from New England by the
American Board of Missions and that it was the group as a whole which did pretty
well by itself.
Their venture a century ago to the Sandwich Islands won for
their descendants still bound together in a tightly cohesive, inter-related
group a pretty solid share in the
virtual mastery of Hawaii's $250,000,000 annual commerce.
What, in contrast, do Christianity's accounts show today as
the reward of their missionary labor?
The balance is not so favorable. A mere handful of the native
Hawaiian population today profess the faith first brought to their "heathen"
forebears in 1820. Today there are but 14,246 pure Hawaiians. The bulk of them
belong to the Mormon and Catholic churches.
It is interesting to reflect on how the Reverends Hiram
Bingham and Asa Thurston might have accepted this. Hardy, granite-willed men of
the Gospel, they were leaders of the first missionary group which arrived off
Kailua, Hawaii, on April 4, 1820, aboard the brig Thaddeus. With them were their
wives and a handful of assistants. A grueling 157-day trip from Boston around
Cape Horn had brought them to their mission goal.
Though it had not knowingly been so timed, the New Englanders
arrived at a propitious moment. Just the year before, the Hawaiian natives had
decided voluntarily to overthrow their ancient system of tabus and idol worship.
This was chiefly at the instance of Kaahumanu and Keopualani, widows of the
famed Kamehameha I, who rebelled particularly against the tabu provisions which
denied the rights of women. Native females, for instance, were not allowed to
eat with their menfolk; nor might they eat such foods as pork, bananas, coconuts
and certain kinds of fish. Now, having flouted the wrath of the old gods and
suffered no vengeance, the natives were open to evangelizing from new sources.
The band from the Thaddeus wasted little time. The Rev. Mr.
Thurston remained at Kailua, where the young king, Kamehameha II, was staying,
and the Rev. Mr. Bingham went on aboard the brig to Honolulu, on the island of
Oahu, 200 miles northward.
The missionaries did famously with native royalty. At Kailua
the king ordered all his chiefs to study the new religion and his own younger
brother, who was to become Kamehameha III, was placed under Thurston's personal
care. At Honolulu, Governor Boki of Oahu took daily Bible lessons from Mr.
Bingham. So enthusiastically did the Hawaiian chieftain embrace the new faith
that a few years later he donated the lands of Punahou to his tutor. Oahu
College was afterwards built on these several thousand acres.
The newcomers got along so well, in fact, that protest was
aroused. When the king, at the behest of his new advisers, began to issue blue
laws straight from the books of old New England, the hard-fisted traders down
along Honolulu's waterfront revolted. They attacked the missionaries, charging
them with taking substantial parcels of land from the natives.
When word of this conflict reached the American Mission Board
back in Boston, a note of rebuke was dispatched to their enterprising
representatives in Hawaii. It said, in part:
"If any of your number shall be betrayed into a spirit of
worldliness and by that means acquire property, the fact would have great
notoriety in this country and become a most painful source of scandal."
Nevertheless the missionaries became more and more closely
associated with the administration of the kingdom. Mr. Bingham was now royal
interpreter for the king he served both Kamehameha II and III in this office and
it became his duty to greet all official visitors. There was more than one
lively clash between the visitors and this stern mission leader with the sharp
features and even sharper temper.
One of these skirmishes was perhaps symbolic of the
differences which, years later, were to come between the island families and the
services. In 1832 Mr. Bingham had it out with Commodore Downes of the U. S.
Frigate Po- tomac over the exclusion of Catholic missionaries from Hawaii. Five
years earlier there had come to the Islands from California two Catholic
priests. They began to draw the natives in great numbers. The native Council of
Chiefs, however, disapproved of these conversions and the priests were banished.
Their converts were sentenced to hard labor. They were still under sentence when
Commodore Downes, who was the first U. S. naval officer to point out the worth
of the Islands as a naval base, arrived in 1832. He protested the matter of the
priests and their converts but Mr. Bingham insisted that the New England
missionaries had nothing to do with the sentence. The officer went then to
native rulers, who almost immediately ordered the prisoners released.
Five years later, the episode was repeated when two French
Catholic missionaries were forcibly returned to the vessel upon which they had
arrived. One of the priests, in feeble health, died at sea a few days later.
This was enough for the French Government to start action. A French frigate
carrying sixty guns arrived off Honolulu in 1839 and sent an ultimatum ashore,
demanding reparations and a promise of religious freedom in the future. The
demand was backed up by a specific threat.
"If these terms are not met in forty-eight hours," the note
concluded, "Honolulu will be under bombardment."
That did it. A treaty was signed on the same day and a
package containing $20,000 was sent aboard. Thereafter the Islands enjoyed
religious freedom. (Seven years later, a French admiral stopped at Hawaii and
returned the $20,000 in the original package, with the seals unbroken, thus
settling the fate of the money.)
But it was the New England missionaries who remained closest
to the crown. Only during the brief reign of Kamehameha IV, from 1854 to 1863,
was their position
somewhat weakened. Englishmen in Honolulu had from the start resented the
influence of the American newcomers and themselves sought to win royal favor.
With
Kamehameha IV they succeeded. The new sovereign surrounded himself with British
advisers and borrowed for his court many of the customs of Buckingham Palace.
Hawaiians had, in fact, long nourished a strangely close kinship with England.
In 1794 the first Kamehameha had signed a paper for Vancouver, the great English
explorer, which virtually turned over his kingdom to Britain. Because it was
known the native monarch could not read, the cession was never formally
recognized. There were many chiefs, however, who for long regarded themselves as
subjects of England's King George. When the Hawaiian flag, still flown with the
Stars and Stripes, was designed, it included in one corner a replica of the
Union Jack.
After Kamehameha IV, the missionaries took over where they
had left off. Besides serving as governmental advisers, many of them now turned
to secular pursuits; the American Mission Board had hinted that the mission
field was over-crowded. In all, sixty-one men and sixty-seven women had arrived
in the fourteen missionary groups, although up to 1842 the adult total never
exceeded eighty. But some measure of their productivity may be gained from the
fact that in 1849 the thirty-five resident missionaries and their wives had a
total of one hundred and thirty-four children.
One of the most successful early businesses in the Islands
was started one day in 1851 when Amos Starr Cooke, a mission teacher from
Connecticut, resigned from the mission to begin a wholesale and retail
partnership with Samuel N. Castle, another former missionary. As Hawaii
prospered, so did their modest partnership. Today the firm of Castle & Cooke,
Ltd., is the Territory's most prosperous and influential business.
Other missionaries resigned to do nearly as well. The
opportunities were limitless. When their business ventures were going well to
provide a surplus of profits there was no better investment than land. Up to
1848, most of the land acquired by the missionaries was that donated by the
kingdom for mission purposes; but in that year the way was cleared no one can
say with deliberate purpose for white men to "buy in." Relying on a plan worked
out by Dr. Gerrit P. Judd, a former missionary who by then was the kingdom's
Minister of the Interior, Kamehameha III announced the Great Mahele, or division
of the lands. One third of the kingdom was reserved for the king and government,
another third was granted to the chiefs and the remaining third went to the
Hawaiian people.
Even before "The Great Mahele," this Dr. Judd had been
roundly scolded by the home office of the Board of Missions which in April 1846
sent a letter to the Honolulu mission reading, in part:
"We have from the beginning lamented that Dr. Judd suffered
himself to go into government a step which he will much regret, should he live a
few years." The Hawaiians, for whom land values had little meaning because of
the traditional custom of living off the king's property, now had their own
parcels, in fee simple.
Furthermore, the "Great Mahele" provided that after 1850 "foreigners," or
non-natives, could acquire land in fee simple. Hawaii was getting set for a real
land rush of her own.
Some of the business-venturing missionaries had early become
interested in the production of sugar, and the prospect of land was an
interesting one. So when thousands of fertile acres became available and cheap,
too they joined the rush. Several sugar plantations had their origin in that
year of opportunism. Today many big landholders in Hawaii are sensitive about
the origin of how they acquired their holdings. A few years ago one missionary
scion went to the extent of subsidizing research and publication of a book which
it was hoped would be accepted as popular non-fiction that defended the manner
in which his forebears obtained their land.
What may have been a commentary upon the tactics of the
Hawaiian missionaries came soon after. In 1853, the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions announced that the Hawaiian Mission would no
longer represent the Board but would henceforth operate independently. Enemies
in the Islands interpreted this to mean that the parent organization was washing
its hands of the Hawaiian group. They claimed the Board was thoroughly
embarrassed by the more worldly aspects of the success attained by its men in
this field. The missionaries themselves pointed to their divorce from the parent
board as evidence only that the Islands had been Christianized well enough to
take care of themselves. Whatever the sentimentbehind the action, the American
Board knew that the process of Hawaii's conversion had been an expensive one.
The accounts showed that up to that time it had expended $608,865 m bringing the
Gospel to the Sandwich Isles.
By 1860, there seemed little doubt that Hawaii's future lay
in large scale production of sugar. For several decades whalers had been stopped
in Honolulu between seasons in the Arctic and the Antarctic. They provided the
lifeblood of island commerce. During the Civil War years, however, a roaming
Confederate cruiser, the Shenandoah, wiped out scores of Yankee whalers. A few
years later, most of the rest of the fleet was lost in the Arctic ice disasters.
Fortune smiled more favorably on sugar and by the close of
the war, production had mounted to more than a thousand tons a year. The United
States bought this sugar and now, at the behest of the planters, Hawaii began to
make overtures for a treaty of reciprocity.
America was not much interested until 1870. In that year,
however, when the Hawaiian planters began to ship their sugar southward to
Australia, Washington began to take notice. When King Kalakaua arrived in the
United States capital in 1875 an d argued personally in Congress for the treaty,
the arrangements were made. Mainly, the treaty allowed for exchange of produce
free of duties. Part of the agreement, signed in 1876, provided that Pearl
Harbor was to be reserved as a coaling station exclusively for the United States
Navy.
The biggest snag struck by Hawaii's sugar pioneers was the
problem of labor. In their search for cheap manpower they scoured the world.
First they brought in Chinese coolies from Hong Kong; that was in 1852. Next
favored was a group of Gilbert Island natives, rounded up by "blackbirders"
whose methods of recruiting were, to put it charitably, open to question. In
fact, the British government did question rather sharply Hawaii's use of their
black subjects and, partially as a result of their investigation and partially
because the natives were pretty useless anyway, they were returned to their own
islands.
The planters turned again to Chinese; then in the half
century which followed they brought in successive waves of Portuguese, Puerto
Ricans, Filipinos and Japanese. The Japanese, who came with the blessing of
their Imperial government, proved most satisfactory as sugar laborers. So, until
United States annexation when the planters were to be hampered by the federal
law against importation of contract laborers, they lured Japanese by the
thousands. By 1893 there were 22,000 Japanese in Hawaii. In the next seven years
50,000 more arrived, the biggest batch 26,000 being hurried in in 1899 just
before adoption of the new Territory's Organic Act put up the bars against
further importation of labor.
With these waves of plantation immigrants the base of
Hawaii's feudal system of society was built up. The process gave to Hawaii a
name by which it came to be known throughout the world. The melting pot of the
Pacific. There was a democratic ring to it, that pleased the sugar planters.
As the sugar industry pushed ahead, something else new was
introduced into the economic scheme of things. In Honolulu two or three new
firms began business solely to handle the affairs of the scattered plantations.
They began by acting as selling agents for the planters. Gradually they took
over other functions: financing crops, importing labor, purchasing machinery for
the planters and serving in all ways as their business agents. The new
businesses soon found themselves running the sugar industry.
Five of these concerns, called factors, eventually dominated
the field. All but one, an English firm, were owned by Americans. By the
eighties the Big Five had
acquired control of many of the plantations. They branched out into other
businesses. To squeeze additional profits out of the sugar trade, they started
their own refinery in California; it was to become the largest in the world.
They built up a fleet of ships, the Matson line, to carry the sugar away and to
bring back goods and passengers. They developed inter-island shipping, built
hotels, put capital into insurance, cattle, pineapples, banking. They took over
bodily the wholesaling of goods coming into the Islands; ninety percent of
retail stock came from their warehouses. Their capital started the public
utilities. Their street railway transported Hawaiians, their gas and electric
plants lighted the city, they acquired the communications systems. The Big Five
became the core of Hawaii's expanding feudal system.
The men who began the factors (two of them were founded by
missionary families) were also busy, in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, shoving the Hawaiian ship of state around in its uneasy political
waters. By 1881 there was little doubt that the United States was very
interested in the future of these mid-Pacific islands. That year Secretary of
State Blaine said that Hawaii was of such importance to United States safety
that no other nation could be allowed to have her.
But it was with the running of the kingdom itself that the
self-appointed guardians of Hawaii were having trouble. The cause was King
Kalakaua, a pleasure-loving, power-seeking monarch with a mind, however erratic,
of his own. Kalakaua, who had won the treaty of reciprocity for the planters,
didn't like to have these same planters interfering in his way of running the
kingdom. A dozen times during his madcap reign, he tried to throw them
overboard. He never quite succeeded.
The American missionary families had little aloha for
Kalakaua. In their mission paper they once printed what few of the king's
subjects would have dared to breathe:
that the portly monarch sprang from noble stock only upon his mother's side,
that his real father was not the man who gave him his name but a well-known and
interloping character around town called John Blossom, a negro blacksmith.
Nevertheless these missionary families were willing to help him to the throne in
1875 largely because his opponent, Queen Emma, widow of Kamehameha V, was
avowedly pro-British. She had gone to England, had sponsored establishment of
the Anglican Church in the kingdom, and might well have turned the Islands over
to the British crown. That would have been fatal to the budding sugar trade.
A favorite of the native Hawaiians, Emma was narrowly
defeated by Kalakaua in an election that hit an all time high in political
skullduggery. After the election, enraged Hawaiian subjects demonstrated their
feelings toward their new sovereign by staging a riot, during which the
legislators who elected him were seriously mauled. Kalakaua was enthroned the
following day under protection of a company of American troops.
The new king went almost immediately to Washington on his
reciprocity errand, to pay off his debt to the group which helped him in. From
then on, however, he gave his erstwhile supporters some uneasy years.
After his return he saddled himself with a pair of flighty
adventurers as his counselors one a discredited Mormon missionary, the other an
Italian lobbyist well known in Washington and California.
Kalakaua first plunged a dagger into the planters' hearts in
1878 when though he had to fire his cabinet to do it he signed a deed giving
choice water privileges on the island of Maui to Colonel Claus Spreckels, the
California sugar king and a fiery rival of the local planters. Spreckels had
secretly bought up, for almost nothing, thousands of acres of dry plains on
Maui. With the water Kalakaua gave him, Spreckels developed his plains into one
of Hawaii's most fertile sugar areas.
With his two hare-brained advisers, Kalakaua then sought to
push through his legislature a bill for a $1,000,000 loan.
They asked him what it was for.
"For military purposes," he answered. He would not elaborate.
But everyone around the Palace knew the king had long dreamed of having his own
private army. The bill was killed. Also killed was a bill giving Kalakaua power
to award licenses for opium sales in the kingdom. Another one defeated would
have loaned Moreno, his Italian adviser, a million dollars for laying a
trans-Pacific cable. In the squabble over these bills the legislature forced the
ousting of Kalakaua's cabinet. The new members drove his two counselors out of
the Islands.
Partially to recover from these disappointments, Kalakaua
decided on a tour of the world in 1880. His cabinet saw that two of their
members went along to keep him out of trouble. They were William N. Armstrong
and Col. C. H. Judd, both of prominent missionary families.
In London, Kalakaua became the lion of the Buckingham Palace
set, the royal family holding a series of receptions and military reviews in his
honor. Throughout Europe and Asia he was accorded honors reserved for crowned
heads of the great nations. The whole tour was a succession of alternate social
triumphs and embarrassing escapades. In Japan the king's two guardians almost
let their charge get out of hand. They discovered one night that Kalakaua had
made a secret visit to the Imperial Palace, without benefit of their
chaperonage.
Upon his return later in the evening, the king blandly
announced that he had been discussing with the Emperor a plan for a matrimonial
alliance which would unite the
thrones of Hawaii and Japan.
"You discussed what?" his incredulous ministers demanded.
"I proposed," the king explained calmly, "a marriage between
one of the imperial princes and my niece, Princess
Kaiulani."
Thunderstruck, Judd and Armstrong had a quick horrible vision
of how this would be received back home in Hawaii, where plans were already
under way for applying for annexation to the United States. Their anxiety was
relieved next day, however, when the Emperor's chamberlain told them privately
that the Empire could not seriously consider Kalakaua's plan.
A finale to the episode was written some months later when
the Imperial chamberlain arrived in Hawaii on a secret mission. He bore a letter
from the Emperor respectfully declining Kalakaua's proposition.
"Japan could not aid in any scheme which impaired the sphere
of American influence over Hawaii," the note said tactfully.
Home again in 1881, Kalakaua, impressed by what he had seen
abroad, began to plan an empire in the Pacific. While his advisers chafed, he
had a sailing ship outfitted as a man-of-war and then dispatched her to Samoa
and other island kingdoms to enlist them into his projected empire. In Samoa his
emissaries and crew went ashore for a program of riotous marathon drinking. The
native king complained. The United States, the German and the British
governments, becoming alarmed that the status quo in the Pacific might be upset,
hurried warships to the scene. Eventually the Hawaiian ship and her befuddled
crew staggered home in disgrace.
The succession of royal escapades was very vexing to sugar
interests and they decided to take Kalakaua in hand. In 1887 the time seemed
opportune. The king was caught red-handed trading off to a Chinese the right to
sell opium throughout the kingdom. His price was $74,000 which he needed to pay
off some gambling debts. Kalakaua might have got away with it, but he greedily
tried to sell the franchise at the same price to still another Chinese. When the
Chinese found they had been duped, they protested to the cabinet.
The ministers, all white men, now had Kalakaua where they
wanted him. Threatening exposure, they demanded that he sign a new constitution
which would virtually strip him of sovereign powers. The king, broken in spirit,
signed after a not too lusty struggle. From then on, he steadily declined and a
few years later, in 1891, died in San Francisco during a trip for his health.
Kalakaua was succeeded by his sister, Liliuokalani. Almost immediately the
strong-willed queen set to work to throw off some of the influence of her white
ministerial advisers. She wanted a new constitution and busied herself rounding
up political support to get it.
"Why, she's more irresponsible than her brother," the worried
sugar men told themselves.
For two stormy years they battled constantly with the queen.
No political intrigue was too low for either side to employ. Then the
missionary-industrialists decided they would have to take stern action. After a
series of secret meetings a Committee of Public Safety was formed its members
inevitably drawn from the inner circle and plans were begun for a new form of
government. On January 14, 1893, the committee called out the citizens' militia,
took over control of public buildings, and declared monarchial rule was done in
Hawaii.
The provisional government that was formed wasted no time in
petitioning Washington for United States annexation. President Harrison had
already declared himself in support of the move but, before action could be
taken, President Cleveland succeeded him. The latter refused to recognize the
overthrow of the monarchy. The sugar leaders now named as head of their
provisional government, Sanford B. Dole. They gave him the title of President of
the Republic of Hawaii.
The infant republic survived a weak attempt at insurrection
in January, 1895. Fighting was confined to skirmishes in the hills. A few men on
both sides were killed before the rebel leaders, who would not admit they had
been recruited by the deposed queen, were captured and placed under arrest. (The
ringleader was soon released and subsequently was elected a member of the first
Territorial Legislature.) Leaders of the republican government had Liliuokalani
arrested as instigator of the rebellion and imprisoned her in her palace. She
was fined $5,000 and sentenced to five years of hard labor, although the
sentence was never carried out.
While Hawaii was enacting this bit of opera bouffe to the
entertainment of a chuckling audience in the United States, something happened
which brought a note of seriousness into the play. America and Spain went to
war.
As United States troops began to embark for the Philippines,
plans were hastily prepared for the annexation of Hawaii. In June, 1898,
President McKinley sent the papers to the Senate which, after some little
debate, ratified the
treaty. A month later the American flag was raised over lolani Palace in
Honolulu. Nearly two years elapsed, however, before Congress passed the Hawaii
Organic Act, which established the Islands as a Territory of the United States.
The act, basic law of the new Territory, provided for a bicameral legislature
and for other governmental functions much like those of a state.
The Territory lacked, however, the privileges of a full-
fledged state. Hawaii could vote, but not for the president of the United
States, nor for her own governor, who was appointed by the president. She had no
voting power in Congress, either. A delegate to Congress could be chosen during
the territorial elections, but he went to Washington without a vote on the floor
of either house. He was privileged only to sit on Congressional committees, to
introduce bills and to speak before either House. His role in Washington was
little more than that of observer and authorized lobbyist. But annexation was
undoubtedly what Hawaii's real rulers wanted. No matter the shape and texture of
the machinery of government, they were confident they could fit their own
political-economic necessities into its framework or vice versa.
The names of each form monarch, provisional government,
republic, territory were principally identification tags for a system which
could be moulded into suitable shape for their needs. Sugar, after all, was
king. The society it supported was still essentially feudal.
THE BIG FIVE IN
1941
"As has been emphasized again and again, the primary -function of our
plantations is not to produce sugar but to pay dividends."
Richard A. Cooke, Annual HSPA Meeting, 1929
The year 1941 was to be for Hawaii to use the tidy phrase
reserved for historians the end of a golden era. But certainly there were few
surface indications in the
early, vibrant months of that year that anything at all was ailing the tight
structure which sugar had reared.
Least of all was it apparent in the breezy commercial life of
Honolulu's downtown in 1941. Men stopped at the corner of Fort and Merchant
Streets men in cool linen suits and wearing wide Panamas with Hawaiian-made
feather hatbands to chat reservedly of the times.
"See you're getting in on some of those fat contracts out at
the Navy Yard, old man."
"Nice the way sugar's been holding up. At these prices we can
afford a little more war. Over in Europe, of course."
"And have you noticed what it's done for our tourist
business?"
Great trucks lumbered by them from the nearby piers. In the
stores lining the street, harried clerks found it impossible to keep up with the
trade. The narrow sidewalks were crowded, an increasingly large proportion of
the passersby were men in uniform. There was a restless clatter about the
downtown scene.
Honolulu's business life was concentrated in these few blocks
which ramped the city's waterfront. And around one of those blocks the one
beginning near the base of Aloha Tower, which reached up finger-like from the
water front five stolid stone buildings stood shoulder above the rest. They were
within shadow reach of each other, two of them inside the one block, the others
facing it from three sides; there was seated the power that governed every
detail of the Territory's commerce.
At the directors' tables in these five buildings sat the
handful of men who governed a feudal, island empire. They numbered about a
dozen. The names of the Big Five, chipped in stone, on the buildings, are:
Alexander & Baldwin, Ltd., American Factors Ltd., Castle & Cooke, Ltd., C.
Brewer & Company, Ltd., and Theo. H. Davies Company, Ltd.
Some years ago an anonymous critic, aware of their growing
dominance, gave the Big Five their name. Within the quintet of companies the
term was frowned upon from the beginning, so for some years the words were
spoken in whispers at least within earshot of the five buildings. By 1941 they
were beginning to be shouted from housetops.
Castle & Cooke, Ltd., was the modern descendant of the little
trading firm that was started in 1851 by the two missionaries, S. N. Castle and
Amos Starr Cooke. In ninety years it had progressed through many cycles of
island business to find itself, in 1941, the dominant member of the group. It
had early entered into the sugar business as a factor for several plantations.
Gradually it bought and finally controlled several of the plantations. So
profitably had it handled the insurance needs of the plantations, and the
thousands of workers connected with them, that some years ago it sloughed off
this activity as a separate, independent business. Hawaii's largest insurance
firm was thus a Castle & Cooke subsidiary. It was Castle & Cooke that caught up
the several shipping services in and out of Hawaii and incorporated them into
the Matson Line which, by 1941, held indisputable control of nearly every ton of
cargo coming in or out of the Islands. Castle & Cooke sponsored Hawaii's highly
promoted tourist business and made it the Islands' third ranking industry. In
1932 Castle & Cooke money bought up much of Hawaii's pineapple industry; by 1941
that was a $50,000,000 a year enterprise. Castle & Cooke capital went into most
of the other investments that the Big Five made in every segment of island
commercial
life.
In 1941 the "take" from this enormous investment was still
going largely to the descendants of the two original missionary tycoons.
Inheritance and inter-marriage had kept the bulk of the income well within the
two families. Only by an occasional "outside" marriage, or the rewarding of a
few Castle & Cooke executives who through the years had helped build the company
structure up, had there been any appreciable thinning out of the returns. Direct
descendants not only shared the income but they took their many places in
executive positions and saw to the actual operation of the corporate machinery
which poured out the plentiful dividends. More than that, it was much this same
tight circle which by 1941, as will be shown, was actually running three of the
other four ruling companies.
The second member of the Big Five was a firm which began
earlier, in 1826, when Captain James Hunnewell, a shrewd Yankee skipper, came
out of Boston as master of one of the missionary ships. After landing the
missionaries, Hunnewell stopped over in the whaling port of Honolulu to start a
general merchandise and hardware business. In 1836 his thriving business was
bought by Captain Charles Brewer from whom it derived its name, C. Brewer &
Company, Ltd. This firm, too, began to serve as agent for the sugar planters and
as the industry prospered it devoted itself more and more to this business. In
1941 it was the only
member of the Big Five dealing exclusively in sugar. It had become an $8,000,000
agency and it was owned by the dominant Big Five group, Captain Brewer having
sold most of his interest in the middle of the last century.
Alexander & Baldwin, Ltd., the third of the Big Five, was
another direct product of missionary endeavor. It was started by Samuel T.
Alexander and Henry P. Baldwin, sons of missionary elders who began planting
cane as an extra-curricular activity while preaching on the island of Maui. The
two ministers' sons confined themselves to a partnership in sugar production
until 1900 when they incorporated with a capital of $1,500,000. The other two
incorporators were J. P. Cooke and James B. Castle, sons of the Castle & Cooke
founders. It was the same way in which the pattern of Big Five ownership had for
long been taking
shape. It was this group which led the movement to establish a California
refinery for Hawaiian sugar, a project that was realized in 1906 when they
pooled $5,000,000 and established the California & Hawaiian Sugar Refinery Co.,
Ltd. at Crockett, California. It soon became the largest sugar refinery in the
world.
The fourth Big Five member, American Factors, Ltd., had its
beginning with the arrival of Captain Henry Hackfeld, a bluff German
capitalist-trader. In 1849 Hackfeld began a mercantile business but, like other
merchants of the time, he saw the possibilities offered by the sugar trade.
"Why shouldn't my firm act as agent for some of these growing
plantations?"
Hackfeld answered his own question by coming to terms with
several of the sugar planters. By 1879 H. Hackfeld & Co. was financing eighteen
sugar plantations. Much of his investment came from Germany. The firm
specialized, too, in importing and gradually became the largest general
wholesale house in the Islands. With German money, it also established
Honolulu's largest department store indeed, the city's only large department
store.
This was severe competition particularly as profits were
going so far overseas and it was regarded by the entrenched interests with a
somewhat jaundiced eye. A bolt strictly out of the blue found the awkward
situation ending quite happily, however, for the more deeply-rooted island
industrialists. In 1917 America entered the World War against Germany and the
Alien Property Custodian effected a quick seizure of the immense Hackfeld
interests. During the war and after, a complicated legal struggle raged over
disposition of the Hackfeld assets. When the smoke cleared, two thriving new
companies had supplanted the late H. Hackfeld firms. Grateful patriotism
undoubtedly inspired the names of the new firms. One was American Factors, Ltd.,
sugar and insurance factors and general wholesalers. The other was The Liberty
House department store. A list of the new owners showed virtually the same names
as dominated other Big Five interests.
Last of the Big Five was Theo. H. Davies Co., Ltd. This
British-owned firm was founded upon a merchandise business started in Honolulu
in 1 845 by the representative of a Liverpool trading concern. The man who gave
it its name was one Theophilus H. Davies who, during two periods of residence in
the Islands, laid the groundwork for the firm's success. Besides representing
and partially owning several plantations and serving as shipping and insurance
agents, the Davies firm carried on a respectable wholesale merchandise and
hardware business. All its stock was British owned, but the company survived by
working hand in hand with other strong interests in the Islands, particularly in
the sugar trade.
These were the five companies which, in 1941, almost
unqualifiedly controlled Hawaii's flow of commerce. For that year it amounted to
$238,217,506. They took their percentage not only coming and going out of the
$47,266,417 in sugar and the $45,899,359 in pineapples that was sent to Mainland
ports, and out of the $127,439,539 in goods coming back but in the thousand and
one comings and goings in between. That is, by ownership of the many agencies in
the Islands, the utilities, the rental properties, and the amusement places
through which the money was over and over again spent.
How effectively the Big Five could band together as one
against outside forces whether the enemy was foreign capital, insects, labor,
competing products or disease was well demonstrated by their Hawaiian Sugar
Planters Association, more familiarly known as the HSPA. This group organization
for Hawaii's sugar industry was founded in 1882 as the Planters' Labor and
Supply Company when the planters found they had common problems in irrigating
the sugar lands, growing the cane, and finding labor. That was its immediate
official purpose. But it took only another step to bring the same group into
other provinces where they could thrash out common problems. Politics, for
example. They soon found that the pooling of their resources gave them influence
in almost any sphere of island life.
Thus, in 1882, formed the nucleus for control by the few.
Since its founding, a roll call of the association's directors in any year would
have shown the names of the men who really ruled Hawaii. It was their decisions
that wrote the history of the Islands.
"Anything can happen to island business, to our sugar, with a
madcap king on the throne," they discovered. "Kalakaua must be controlled." So
they drew up the terms of Hawaii's Bayonet Constitution.
"Queen Liliuokalani will ruin us all. She'll have to step
down." Monarchy was ruled out and island republic born.
"With annexation we wouldn't need any reciprocity treaty." So
Hawaii became a territory, an integral part of the United States.
And in the half century since, a considerable portion of the
legislation passed and action taken by the Territory's government was inspired
by decisions made at the business meetings of the HSPA.
In recent years the HSPA, which had brought plantation labor
into the Islands, was much concerned with keeping that labor in line. In 1920,
for example, when sugar workers on plantations on the island of Kauai struck,
the Kauai plantations lost thousands upon thousands of dollars before it was
able to break the strike which, finally, it did. It was revealed later that it
was not just the Kauai plantations paying the anti-strike expenses. Every
plantation member of the HSPA had been assessed a portion of the expenses, for
this was a threat to all of them. In the next Territorial Legislature after this
disagreeable experience with labor, a law was passed which forbade picketing, a
measure which subsequently became an effective weapon against the threat of
strikes.
The HSPA made no pretense of being anything but a means of
making as much money as it was possible to make out of sugar. Planters
themselves were reminded of this at the annual meeting in 1929, in the words of
their president, Richard A. Cooke. In his annual report Mr. Cooke, also
president of C. Brewer and Co. said:
"As has been emphasized again and again, the primary function
of our plantations is not to produce sugar, but to pay dividends."
Fundamentally, the HSPA's work was in the field of science,
carried on chiefly by its experimental station which was granted an annual
budget of $500,000. And, indeed, the association performed practical miracles in
the way of developing breeds of cane, in combating insect pests, in perfecting
labor-saving devices, and in marketing their produce.
A dramatic example of the station's work was the conquest of
the sugar cane borer, which some years ago threatened to wipe out the industry.
For years HSPA
scientists scoured the wilds of South America, Australia and Malaya to find a
parasite that would be fatal to the borer and harmless to the cane. And after it
had been found it took four years to transport the parasite and land it alive in
Hawaii; but in a few years more, when it had sufficiently multiplied, it was
able to bring the cane borer under control.
Just as practically the HSPA performed other chores for
island planters. A well-staffed office was maintained in Washington where one of
the most capable sugar executives had a year-round job as lobbyist, working
closely with the delegates the territory sent to the capital.
The effectiveness of Hawaii's sugar lobby has moved many
islanders to ask themselves a question. "Which is our real representative in
Washington the one the HSPA appoints, or the one we elect every two years by
popular vote?"
The more cynical told themselves it was a toss-up. In each
case, they said, the man was more or less hand-picked by the HSPA.
In 1941 the HSPA was throwing the bulk of its political
efforts into the campaign to obtain statehood for Hawaii. For the Islands were
beginning to go into another cycle which to sugar men seemed to indicate a need
for some kind of governmental change. The increasing productivity of beet sugar
and cane plantations on the Mainland was beginning to show results in
legislation passed by Congress. It favored the growing Mainland industries, and
of course the Hawaiian planters felt such legislation was highly discriminatory.
The most indeed, the only effective way of fighting such discrimination would be
with congressional votes. Statehood, which would put two senators and at least
one representative in Congress, seemed to be the solution. The HSPA put into the
statehood campaign the same thoroughness, patience, and zeal which had conquered
the cane borer.
Only the year before, they had learned by bitter experience
how futile for their cause was anything short of congressional votes in hand. In
1940 they had appealed to Mainland business associates for help in Hawaii's
fight against discrimination. Lists had been made of the firms which profited by
Hawaii's huge annual imports. To these firms form letters were sent, reminding
them of the considerable business the Islands gave them.
"It would certainly be helpful to us and certainly beneficial
to your business here if you would write or contact the congressmen of your area
and the senators of your
state. . . . Suggest to them that their constituents have an interest in equal
treatment for these islands."
There was no threat of switching island business over to
other firms. The theme of the letters was, rather, that Mainland firms would
surfer in proportion as island buying power was reduced by lower sugar profits.
The campaign didn't seem to take hold, however, and nothing much came of it.
The Big Five, in surveying its economic realm as of 1941,
could reflect with particular satisfaction upon its sure grasp on Hawaii's
second ranking industry the $50,000,000 pineapple trade. A backward glance at
the growth of the trade will indicate the manner in which the Big Five added
this enterprise to its domain.
It was not until the turn of the century that pineapples were
even worthy of the attention of men who were building their fortunes in sugar.
The first large scale production of the fruit had been started by a Captain John
Kidwell who exported 14,000 cases from 1892 to 1899. Attracted by this scale of
business, the five factors began to invest money in small pineapple plantations
on the various islands. One thing that appealed to them was the comparatively
little capital needed for the production of pines. Pineapple plantations, for
instance, required none of the extensive water resources necessary for sugar. In
recent years, even when the crop value of pineapples had nearly caught up with
that of sugar, the capital investment in pineapples was only $25,000,000,
compared to sugar's $175,000,000.
James D. Dole, a newcomer in the Islands, breathed life into
the pineapple business after 1900. He saw that the industry had barely scratched
the surface of its possibilities.
"What you need is promotion," he told the pineapple pioneers.
"Pineapples have to be advertised and your canneries ought to be speeded up."
He showed them how to do it, and in a very short time Mr.
Dole was a dominant figure in the industry. His name became a household word in
the many parts of the world where canned pineapples were shipped.
One of his slogans was particularly successful. "Look for
Dole on the Can." However, it lived to plague Dole's party-loving sons when in
later years American slang provided a new connotation for the word "can."
By 1910, largely as a result of Dole's enterprise, there were
5,300 acres under pineapple cultivation, and 7,800 employees at work on the
pineapple plantation. In 1940 there were 78,000 acres, 35,000 employees, and the
crop was worth $50,522,533. But the expansion had not come without some violent
growing pains. They were particularly painful for Mr. Dole.
In 1930 the pineapple industry was hit by double disaster
when the world-wide depression caught the plantations with an over-supply of
fruit, nearly enough already in inventory to take care of the next year's needs.
Dole's firm, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, was ready to go under if funds in
plenty were not advanced. The two other large packing concerns, Libby, McNeill
and Libby and the California Packing Company, were kept afloat when these two
Mainland interests poured fresh capital into the business. Hawaiian Pine found
its "savior" in the Big Five. Castle & Cooke capital tided the struggling firm
over. But when the crisis was past, it was apparent that a considerable change
had taken place in the picture of stock ownership. Dole found he had become a
very minor shareholder in the industry he had brought up so well from its
infancy. Castle & Cooke was now in control of the stock. From 1932 on, Hawaiian
Pine was strictly a Big Five business.
With traditional thoroughness, the Big Five set about to
protect its stake in the pineapple trade. That same year the well-trained
Hawaiian legislature passed a very special law which allowed for the
incorporation of co-operative associations. The law made it legal to set up
"co-operatives to protect, control and stabilize the marketing of agricultural
product, . . . prevent inefficient and wasteful methods of distribution, . . .
prevent surpluses in excess of requirements and avoid undue and excessive
fluctuations or depressions in prices therefore . . ."
This paved the way for formation of the Pineapple Producers
Co-Operative Association. Here was something patterned after the HSPA, but
something which had infinitely finer possibilities for monopoly than the sugar
pool. The six island companies (besides the two Mainland packers and Hawaiian
Pine there were three smaller firms controlled by Alexander & Baldwin and
American Factors) virtually monopolized the world pineapple trade. The HSPA,
though all-powerful in Hawaii, was a relatively puny creature against the lusty
competition of world sugar markets.
The new pineapple co-operative members lost little time in
adjusting their business to the pleasant boundaries of the custom-built law. In
1932, and each year thereafter, they decided in advance just what the annual
pack of canned fruit would be. Each member company was assigned its share of
that agreed-upon total. This was not exactly monopoly price fixing, but even if
someone were to press such a charge, members could point to that section of
their 1932 Territorial law which read: "such co-operatives shall be deemed not
to be a conspiracy nor a combination in restraint of trade nor illegal monopoly;
nor an attempt to lessen competition or to fix prices arbitrarily to create a
combination or monopoly."
It was not strange that the pineapple industry, favored by
gifts like that, was blossoming so well in 1941.
In that year the twin industries, sugar and pines, could look
upon the character and composition of life in Hawaii and say, were they disposed
to use so dramatic a phrase: "All this, we have wrought."
Looking further upon the nature of the Islands' social makeup
the incredible melting 'pot which resulted from their frantic search for cheap
labor they might well have reflected with uneasiness upon this that they had
wrought. In 1941 Hawaii's population was sociologically a varicolored human
pyramid which reached upwards to a tiny group of white families at the top. The
broad base of the feudal social structure was made up of 323,712 Japanese,
Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Puerto Rican immigrants and their descendants.
Tragically enough, the mass also included the pitiful remnant of the Islands'
Polynesian race, 14,246 pure Hawaiians. In between were 141,627 Caucasians. But
60,000 of these were men of the armed forces, and thousands more were Portuguese
plantation immigrants and their descendants whose economic status was little
higher than that of the imported Orientals. So it will be seen that the total of
white men who could be regarded as a white- collar middle class was something in
the very few thousands.
By the 1930's it was evident that island planters had not
been thinking of the social much less the military consequences when they continued to import more and more
thousands of laborers. They did not seem aware that their system of filling
labor needs had been something like trying to fill a bottomless bag. Ever since 1900 when incorporation of Hawaii as a Territory had nullified penal labor contracts, thousands of laborers had begun to drift from the
plantations. It seemed that laborers brought in went through
a process of acclimatization on the plantations, then moved
on to the more fruitful, or at least more comfortable, sphere
of urban or independent agricultural work. Perhaps the
planters thought, when they dwelt upon the problem at
all, that laborers would return to their homelands when
they left the plantations. It was rarely that they did.
Nevertheless, by the 1930*5 there was no doubt that a
limit to the expansion of sugar production had been reached.
World over-production, then the introduction of quota
systems brought sharply to the attention of short-sighted
sugar industrialists that perhaps they didn't need more
labor, that maybe they already had enough. The advances
their technologists had been making in the field of labor saving devices only
heightened the problem. Plantations began to turn away labor.
But the sugar technologists could not solve the social
problem bred by their masters. By the middle of the thirties
unemployment, even the threat of starvation was beginning
to pile an exasperatingly heavy load upon the paternalistic,
private system of charity sponsored by the sugar and pineapple profits.
By 1937 the sugar leaders saw what looked like the solution. The New Deal's Social Security program was then
claiming considerable attention.
"Why not switch this relief load from our local private
charities," they asked themselves, "to the federal government's national welfare program? Uncle Sam can easily take
care of this out of United States taxes."
It sounded like a capital idea and executives of the private
charity agencies jumped to the task of framing a bill setting up a Territorial Social Security System. With Big
Five support behind it, the formality of passing the bill
was soon over with, and within a year the new Department
of Welfare was cheerily handling island relief problems.
The public relief budget soared to a million dollars a year. This left as the
immediate responsibility of the sugar planters in 1941 only the 40,000 laborers, mostly Japanese and
Filipinos, who remained on their plantations. Social Security and Hawaii of the future would take care of the other
300,000 progeny whom sugar had bequeathed. Luckily,
the need for labor on the great new island defense projects
was temporarily solving the relief and unemployment problems that social security could not meet.
But in any event, the men who dealt in sugar and pines
were busy in 1941 with their other interests. One of these
was shipping. Great cargoes of defense materials waited on
West Coast docks for space to the Islands; they competed so
successfully against the normal shipments that Honolulu
merchants started agitation for a system of priorities. But
the Big Five was mad at nobody. They made money, no
matter what was shipped.
Although the United States Maritime Commission had
begun to nose around, the Big Five still held a vise-like grip
on all trade that touched the Islands. It was more than a
figure of speech to say that the Matson Navigation Co.,
Ltd., a Big Five enterprise, got its cut out of every passenger and ton of goods entering or leaving Hawaii. Big Five
tactics had seen to this.
By 1929 the Matson Line had cornered all shipping touching Hawaii except what business the struggling Dollar Line
did at the port as part of its transpacific and around-the-world runs. What Matson did not like was the bargain rates
Dollar charged for both cargo and passengers. Matson decided to lop off this trade by throwing a scare into Dollar.
The line put two ships up against Dollar's transpacific trade,
at a heavy but anticipated loss. It had the desired effect.
The Matson ships had operated on the new run only long
enough to drop $164,000 before Dollar was ready to call
it quits. If Matson would keep out of the transpacific trade,
Dollar would be willing to lift its prices on Honolulu traffic
up to the Matson level. When the agreement was finally
signed, the Dollar Line had also agreed that out of every
dollar of gross income on its Mainland-Hawaii business-freight or passenger it would turn over to the Matson Line
fifty cents.
Even when the Matson Line in 1930 discontinued third
class passenger rates to confine itself to the better-paying
first and second class business and Dollar ships took over the
traffic, Matson got half the price of every third-class ticket
sold by Dollar. The Dollar Line even had to split fifty-fifty
on freight shipments Matson turned over when it was too
busy.
By 1941 the Matson Line had a fleet of 43 ships, including
four sleek luxury liners, and had upped the tourist trade
to Hawaii's third ranking business. Here, in this $12,000,000
a year trade was the Big Five's giddiest money-making
enterprise.
It had its really serious beginning in 1927 when the
Matson Line decided to go into the tourist business on a big
scale. That year the line donated most of the $2,000,000
necessary to build the sprawling pink stucco Royal Ha-
waiian Hotel. The hotel described by some as the world's
finest resort, by others as an architectural monstrosity, was
set on the edge of Waikiki Beach. With this as its largest
prop, the Big Five set about dressing up the other trimmings
which would help lure visitors to their enchanted islands.
With the Hawaii Tourist Bureau and later the Pan-Pacific
Press Bureau as high pressure publicity mills grinding out
the lyrics, the tourist interests joined in singing seductive
songs of the Islands. The theme of their advertising cam-
paign was early Polynesian. Modern Hawaii was painted as
a palm-shaded Eden peopled only by soft-skinned hula
maidens and by bronzed native men who were perpetually
either riding in from the sea on surf-boards or standing
poised with fish nets along its shore. In 1941 the tourist
bureau placed $125,000 worth of magazine advertising
featuring pictures such as these.
The reception of the incoming tourists was highly or-
ganized. They were met at the dock by a staff of hula girls
they grow more and more like theatre ushers who
adorned them with flower leis. Then they were whisked
through busy, downtown Honolulu and dropped among
the palms of the Royal Hawaiian's little tropical settlement
at Waikiki. There every care was taken to keep the tropic
illusion intact. There was the beach outside, edged by a
thinning line of dispairing coco palms, and the famed surf
upon which they could ride on native canoe or board with
beach boy escorts at $2.50 per three waves. There was
dancing under the stars, with entertainment by hula girls
in special cellophane skirts. There were even luaus, native
feasts, where the visitors with appropriate shudders could
sample raw fish, cooked octopus tentacles and paste-like poi,
native delicacies which most Hawaiians long ago began to
eschew in favor of medium-rare steaks, ice cream and whole
wheat bread. And the visitors could take home proof of all
these primitive, Polynesian experiences, as a special service,
for the island branch of Eastman-Kodak provided an agile
group of coconut tree climbers, hula dancers, and net fisher-
men, all properly costumed. This service was arranged once
a week, the day after the Matson boat arrived.
The seat of much of Hawaii's synthetic tropic glamour
was at Lalani Village, an area much resembling a set for one
of Hollywood's immortal classics of the South Sea. Two
blocks away from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the "village"
included a couple of bedraggled grass huts, a tent for native
feasts, and a pile of rocks with red lights underneath, made
up to resemble an active volcano. The volcano, which re-
minded one of nothing so much as a pile of those fake fire-
place logs, was tricked up to spew fire like a Roman candle.
This show of fireworks usually featured the hula "Dance
of the Fire Gods" which climaxed the village's nightly side-
show for tourists.
Illustrated posters outside the village added a commercial
touch to the Polynesian themes the Pan-Pacific Press had
promoted
"Sing the ancient chants of old Hawaii." . . .
"Enjoy a native luau. Admission: $2.50." . . .
"Learn to dance the hula. Three dollars a lesson." . . .
Almost any promoter less dogged would have been discouraged
at the task of trying to keep alive the illusion of
simple native life on the one hand and the picture of a
progressive American community that they were sponsor-
ing for statehood purposes, on the other. But the Big Five,
measuring such things by the yardstick of income, was
content. The tourist business was doing nicely, with its
annual gross of $12,000,000. The statehood drive just
needed a little time.
Of all their interests, the Big Five perhaps had the least
trouble with the public utilities. In a field like that there
is no competition for the early birds, and the Big Five were
so early there wouldn't have been time to whisper "John
Sherman." By 1941 every time a native Hawaiian switched
on his light, turned on the gas, or rode on a street car, he
paid a tiny tribute into Big Five coffers. That year a Castle
was president of the Honolulu Gas Company, Ltd., a Cooke
was president of the Hawaiian Electric Co., Ltd., and a
Castle was president of the Honolulu Rapid Transit Co.
Only in the latter field did the Big Five have to fight off
any competition. By some oversight, the public utilities
commission did not grant a public carrier franchise restric-
tive enough to keep small independent firms from moving
into the more productive transportation areas. Hence, in
the middle thirties, the Honolulu Rapid Transit Co. with
its antiquated system of little trolley cars, was plagued by
a number of independent jitney lines which ran along its
lucrative Waikiki-Downtown Honolulu route. For a couple
of years the company battled it out with the "wildcat"
operators. Most of them were gradually knocked out by
fresh, custom-built city-county regulations governing taxi-
cab operations. The process was something like swatting at
flies, for as quickly as one shoestring company expired an-
other sprang up. But by 1938 only one operator remained
with assets enough to challenge the HRT, a taxicab owner
named Rosecrans.
This operator had built up a line of swift rickety busses
which rocketed from the beach to the city and back. His
busses were generously patronized by Honolu'ans, not
only because they outsped the lumbering trolley cars, but
because the customers enjoyed the needling that HRT was
so obviously taking. As Rosecrans began to add more and
more busses to his fleet, Rapid Transit desperately launched
into a program of modernization, changing over from trolley
cars to gasoline, and then electrically-operated silver busses.
The first bus route it opened was, quite naturally, on the
Waikiki run. Overpowered by this new competition, Rose-
crans in 1940 declared himself willing to talk compromise.
Hurriedly, the HRT bought up his business and sold his
gallant fleet to the Navy, which promptly confined them
to Pearl Harbor. Rosecrans, pocketing the profitable payoff,
retired to his taxicab business. In the minds of Honolulu
commuters he lives today as something of a savior, "The
man who modernized Honolulu's street car system."
That the profits resulting from marketing the $127,439,-
439 worth of goods brought into Hawaii during 1941 went
largely into Big Five pockets was a foregone conclusion.
The Big Five, through a score of subsidiary interests, dealt
heavily in the merchandising field. Having taken their per-
centage from the top of this commerce by reason of having
shipped it to the Islands, they saw that more cuts were taken
out of it during the several processes it went through before
reaching the consumer. The ultimate consumer saw plenti-
ful evidence of this when he began to think of building a
home, and ran into the Big Five's lumber trust. This ring, a
dominant member of which was Lewers & Cooke, Ltd.,
controlled 91% of the island lumber business. By the time
the islander's new home was complete, he was ready to ask
some angry questions.
"Why should this house, which is no better than the one
my brother Ed built in California, run into such a figure?
His cost $5,000. Mine comes to nearly twice that much!"
A report on Hawaii's lumber trade for 1941 that was pub-
lished in a national magazine partially told why. It revealed
that lumber which cost $15 a thousand board feet on the
West Coast was marked up to a neat $28.50 when it reached
Honolulu docks. This was to cover "shipping costs." By
the time it reached the prospective homebuilder, it was $78
a thousand board feet.
If this process were carried out with other products, the
total Big Five take could be nothing short of staggering. For
the Big Five similarly stocked their plantation stores, which
did as much as a million-dollar-a-year business, stocked their
own chain of wholesale and retail stores, Hawaii's largest
department store, The Liberty House, and a thousand
small, independent shops throughout the Islands.
Added to this merchandising activity were the com-
missions which the Big Five made as agents for hundreds of
Mainland corporations. Through the five island companies
these corporations released their multitude of products
from golf balls to tractors, insurance travel tickets, medical
supplies. Little of the territory's stream of commerce was
not channeled through Big Five holdings.
By keeping a firm finger on the political pulse, the Big
Five had little trouble in controlling the sale of goods to
local governments. A few years ago, when some of this
business began to go to independent Honolulu branches of
Mainland concerns, the Territorial Legislature passed a bill
reorganizing city-county departments under bureaus, each
with a purchasing agent. There was little surprise when
these purchasing agents directed government business back
into Big Five channels. One businessman who tried to break
into this well-protected field, pointed out to the city-county
board of supervisors that, while his bids on medical supply
contracts were turned down, the bureau agent was purchas-
ing the same supplies from a Big Five affiliate at five and six
times his price. Nothing was done about it.
Nor were any government economies realized when the
city-county auditor reported in a public statement that a
local Big Five-controlled firm was charging the government
many times the price charged at their store for identical
products. Instead, the auditor was subsequently offered a
full-time, lifelong trusteeship of one of Hawaii's largest
estates, tightly linked with the Big Five. He accepted.
Usually such a purely political problem would have been
handled with much less grace, for the straight power tactics
which always had characterized Big Five statesmanship were
still operative as late as 1941. A handy start toward Big
Five domination of politics was the fact that in the 1941
Territorial Legislature, as for session after session before,
the president of the Senate was George P. Cooke, a ranking
member of the well-distributed missionary family. And the
speaker of the House was Roy A. Vitousek, head of the
HSPA's legal department. It was not surprising that bills
sometimes were patterned, cut and tailored within the
inner sanctums of the Big Five downtown, then were sent
up to the legislature to become, forthwith, laws of the
Territory.
One such measure, however, came a cropper during the
1941 session. This was when Walter Dillingham, a young
newly-elected representative and scion of an island family
which had had several brushes with Big Five interests,
brashly challenged a Big Five bill calling for construction
of a new $3,000,000 pier in Honolulu harbor, with terri-
torial funds.
The bill had been dutifully introduced by George
Eguchi, a Japanese member of the House who, when not
legislating, worked as a chemist for the Hawaiian Pineapple
Co. Young Dillingham claimed that harbor facilities already
were ample enough, and quoted a survey to that effect made
less than two years before by the United States district
engineer. He charged that the bill was a scheme to mulct the
public for private interest. Castle & Cooke sent its presi-
dent armed with maps and statistics, into the legislature to
fight for the bill. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, pro-Big Five,
printed a page one picture showing five ships waiting out-
side Honolulu harbor, with the caption: "Why We Need
New Pier."
Next day the United States customs collector angrily
revealed this as misrepresentation. He pointed out that the
ships had just arrived off port and were waiting, as was
customary, for customs and quarantine clearance. There
was plenty of docking space inside the harbor, he said.
The opposing young representative made the most of such
tactics. He won the support of the more liberal-minded men
in the legislature, and stubbornly resisted all attempts to
force the measure through.
Meanwhile Hawaii's M-Day bill, drafted with the aid of
Army and Navy officials as critical to Hawaii and United
States defense, had not been acted upon. It was tied up in
the House judiciary committee, the chairman of which was
another young HSPA attorney. Though other legislators
clamored for action on the measure, and the public stormed
the local papers with letters protesting against the delay, it
remained in committee day after day of the brief, two-
months' session. The legislature busied itself hearing argu-
ments on the pier bill. It was to no avail, however, for
when it finally came up for a vote, the pier measure was
killed. No vote at all was taken on the M-Day bill and the
session ended with it unacted upon . . . Pearl Harbor was
then only a few months away.
The full power of pressure politics was more successfully
applied when the Big Five breathed fire during the bitterly
contested elections of 1932. There had been growing signs
of independence, it was felt, among the political leaders they
had put into office. Most amazing was the conduct of
Hawaii's delegate to Congress, the Hon. Victor Houston.
When the Filipino Exclusion Bill, prohibiting further immi-
gration from the Philippines to the United States, came up
in Congress in 1931, sugar leaders hastily ordered Houston
to work for insertion of a rider exempting Hawaii because
of her need for plantation laborers.
Houston was of a different mind. "Hasn't sugar by now
imported more than enough labor?" he asked. "The men are
here and they would do plantation work if the wages were
attractive enough."
To the sugar planters such an attitude was outright
heresy. Luckily for them, the November elections came
along before the Exclusion Bill was acted upon.
By that time the angry island industrialists were de-
termined upon a clean sweep. The regular stable of politicians was considerably
surprised, when they staged the
usual rallies at the big plantations. They found themselves
addressing empty seats. Inquiries revealed that workers,
from field hands to executives, had been advised to stay
away. Plantation votes were not coming their way that year.
Nor did many others. When the returns were in it was dis-
covered that a whole new slate had been elected in the
Islands. Houston himself was defeated by Lincoln L.
McCandless, an island capitalist who, though a democrat,
could be relied upon to vote for "the best interests of
Hawaii." And the new delegate fulfilled his promise. When
the Johnson Act prohibiting Filipino immigration was
passed in ,193 3 it had attached to it the desired rider grant-
ing exemption to the Territory of Hawaii.
If a few liberal voices were raised in protest against the
constrictive system that was binding up nearly every phase
of their life, they might have found difficulty in making
themselves heard. The island newspapers and at least one
of the two Honolulu radio stations were too dependent
upon Big Five finances or advertising to countenance any
really serious attack on the set-up. The Territory's largest
newspaper, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, had enough Big Five
capital behind it to espouse the gilt-edged side of any island
controversy. The Honolulu Advertiser, its morning rival,
struck a more liberal pose but always recapitulated toward
Big Five conservatism when the chips were down. Ad-
vertiser staff members were a long time recovering after
their publisher, in 1939, accepted the sugar interests' in-
vitation to make a reportorial junket through Mainland
cane and sugar beet areas to compare conditions there to
Hawaii plantation life. The copy the publisher sent back
did not come directly to the desk editors of his paper; it
first went to the Pan-Pacific Press Bureau, the Big Five
publicity mill, to undergo careful editing. The tone of the
completed product was that the Hawaii plantations sur-
passed anything on the Mainland, insofar as employee bene-
fits were concerned.
But Big Five aggressiveness reached even farther than
the press in the attempt to muzzle free speech. By the
middle thirties, the growing rumble of protests against island
monopoly became serious enough to call for an organized
counter-movement. The plan was for a large scale system
of industrial and community espionage. On the plantations
the campaign tactics called for secret recruiting of trusted
employees who would report on their fellows. They were
to report regularly on how other workers felt and spoke
about labor, politics, monopolies. Representatives for the
various racial groups were assigned.
Even the executives of Big Five companies were not free
of this system. One of the Territory's leading statesmen,
Senator William Heen, a former circuit court judge, com-
mented upon the situation in a published statement. He told
of standing on a street corner talking to an official of one
of the five firms, when the president of the company ap-
proached.
"Sorry," said the executive, "you're a Democrat and I
can't afford to be seen talking with you."
And with that he hurriedly took off.
Headquarters for the espionage campaign was in a little
office in the Castle & Cooke building. There the records of
malcontents were kept. Sometimes the staff passed the word
along to plantation officials to warn such and such a worker
against loose talk. Sometimes a worker was summarily dis-
charged for "inefficiency" or "neglect of duty."
When a Joint Congressional Committee from Washing-
ton came to Hawaii in 1937, to study the question of state-
hood, they heard of this system. A committee member,
Senator Joseph C. O'Mahoney, of Wyoming, solicited in-
formation from a witness who testified before the Com-
mittee.
"Can you give us the name of anyone employed by the
sugar industry collecting information on private activities
of employees?" the Senator inquired. The hearing was being
conducted in the Senate chamber of the Territory's Legisla-
ture in Honolulu. A capacity crowd jammed the room.
The witness hesitated a moment before replying: "Yes.
Lawrence M. Judd."
Though this was by no means a revelation to most of the
islanders present, a stir of excitement ran through the specta-
tors. Lawrence M. Judd was a former governor of Hawaii.
He had immediately preceded the incumbent Governor
Poindexter.
Judd, the witness testified, was head of a Big Five organi-
zation gathering confidential material on plantation labor.
The group, which bore the title of the Industrial Relations
Committee, had headquarters in the Castle & Cooke building.
The investigating senators were amazed to discover that
the same system was reported active in Honolulu business
offices, in banks, stores and among the waterfront stevedores.
They had little success, however, in flushing out specific
examples of intimidation at their committee meetings. The
hearings were public and many witnesses who started boldly
with the intention of naming names and citing cases con-
fined themselves only to generalities when their turns came
to speak. They reasoned, undoubtedly, that they had noth-
ing to gain by their disclosures and much to lose. There
were many ways in which they could be "reached" for
reprisal.
It was the Big Five men, their board members and execu-
tives, who filled most public board and commission seats,
and thus dictated the policies for channels of influence that
reached into nearly every island home. They decided how
the police administration, the public schools, social agencies,
government institutions should be run. They put a lot of
extra-curricular time in on it too. Thus, a vice-president of
Alexander & Baldwin at one and the same time was presi-
dent of the Board of Public Instruction, president of the
Territorial Department of Social Security, president of the
Honolulu Council of Social Agencies, president of the
Children's Aid Association and director of a half dozen
other such community organizations.
In their role as guardians of Hawaii's destiny, Big Five
members naturally championed the cause of private charity.
Their firms gave elaborately to Honolulu's Community
Chest, even agreeing upon a tax-free contribution from
sugar profits on a ratio based upon each plantation's pro-
duction that year. The Community Chest was the particular
"baby" of the Big Five and each year its board membership
represented the entrenched interests as consistently and
as exclusivelyas did the board of the HSPA. In their
enthusiasm for this system of welfare financing, the Chest
committee planned its campaign goal by fixing the amount
each business house in town must raise. The business firm,
in turn, told each employee what he must donate to attain
their house quota. A payroll deduction plan was generally
used. Anyone who took exception to the system, and said
so, became a likely candidate for the Big Five's roll of
malcontents. Thus, through a bewilderingly intricate system of con-
trols, the handful of men who in 1941 occupied top place in
this amazing little kingdom of sugar and spite could, if they
wanted, reach out and determine the success or failure of
any one of a half million vassal people.
But that year there were things happening, within and
without their tight domain, which were beginning very
seriously to threaten their rule.
Within, there were a half dozen regions of discord. There
were men in Hawaii, outside the inner circle, who were
capable of leadership and who for long had chafed under
the many unnatural restrictions of Big Five dominance;
they were men who had long been ready to assert them-
selves and needed only a first show of weakness to act.
There was the rising voice of labor, finally becoming
articulate in the Islands. There were the Army and the
Navy with enough strength, and now with enough reason,
to speak in a voice of authority.
From the outside, there was approaching something great
enough to have the effect of changing the whole stature of
Hawaii changing it from that of an economic entity, a
prosperous civilian community, to a war role as a forward
garrison in the nation's system of military defense and
offense. Hawaii happened to be sitting exactly midway be-
tween two antagonists who were thinking seriously during
1941 of taking a swipe at each other.
Japan got in the first blow on December 7th.
It was something too big even for the Big Five to handle.
Submitted by Christine Walters