Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  Hewlett Janders replied, “I’m on the board, so is John Whipple Hoxworth. The third member is Harry Helmore and he can certainly be trusted.”

  “Will you speak for Harry?” Hale asked.

  “Well, he’s married to my cousin Abigail,” Hewlett pointed out. “I guess I can speak for him.”

  “Is it agreed then that under no circumstances will Malama Kanakoa be allowed to sell the Swamp to McLafferty?”

  “So far as I’m concerned,” Hewlett replied. “How about you, John Hoxworth?”

  “It would be criminal to admit a man like that into our city.”

  “Then it’s agreed,” Hoxworth announced, but his natural caution in these matters was not yet satisfied, so he asked, “Let’s suppose for a minute that this talk about a hotel was a blind. Let’s suppose that McLafferty was acting as front man for someone entirely different. Gentlemen, I think that’s a fair supposition. Whom does this man really represent?”

  The wily, practiced men of The Fort turned their whole attention to this problem. Slowly John Whipple Hoxworth, a thin, clever man with a typical Whipple intellect, reasoned: “The group that was most furious when we turned them back was California Fruit, but I think that out of natural vanity they would refuse to recruit an agent from Boston. It just wouldn’t seem palatable to a Californian. I don’t think O. C. Clemmons is going to fight again, and after two bad whippings I doubt that Gregory’s will be back. Therefore I have to conclude that it’s Shea and Homer. It’s the kind of trick they’d pull, and after all, remember that Shea is a prominent Catholic.”

  “I wonder if it could be Gregory’s after all?” Hoxworth mused. “Has anybody met this McLafferty yet?”

  No one had, and the meeting ended with Hale’s final warning: “I suppose you’ve all read that California Fruit has signed a contract with their labor unions? Gregory’s entered into one three years ago, and you know the Shea and Homer stand. If you require any encouragement in this fight to keep men like McLafferty out of our city, keep the labor union angle in mind.”

  When the others had left The Fort, Hoxworth Hale sat brooding upon the things they had been discussing, and he could not comprehend how any sensible man who loved Hawaii would even consider allowing an outfit like Gregory’s entrance to the islands. “Why, damn it all!” he growled. “They’re outsiders. They undercut established principles, and if they made a little money, what would they do with it? Siphon it off to New York. Does it ever do Hawaii any good? Not a penny of it.” He looked out his window toward the Missionary Public Library, built with family funds, then toward the Missionary Art Museum, which his Grandfather Ezra had endowed with half a million dollars and a Rembrandt. In the distance lay the Missionary Natural History Museum, housing an unmatched collection of Hawaiian artifacts, and beyond it stood the rugged, magnificent memorial to old Abraham Hewlett’s love of the Hawaiian people, Hewlett Hall, where Hawaiian boys and girls were given free a first-rate education. More important were the things that could not be seen: the family professorships at the university, the Missionary Foundation for Oceanic Research, the Missionary Fund for Retired Ministers. You could scarcely touch an aspect of Hawaii which had not been improved and nourished by some member of The Fort.

  “Suppose we allowed Gregory’s to come in and operate as they wished,” Hoxworth mused. “Let’s look at Honolulu fifty years from now. Is there going to be a Gregory’s Museum, or a Gregory’s School for Hawaiians? They will steal our money and give us nothing in return except lower prices for a little while. Will their executives raise large families here and put their children to work in the islands? They will not. We will have soulless absentee landlordism of the worse sort. If Gregory’s ever do wedge their way into the islands … after my death I hope … they will bring us nothing … nothing.”

  He walked back and forth in real perplexity and came at last to the nexus of his thinking: “No, I’m wrong. They’ll bring two things. They’ll bring political unrest, because half of their people will be New Deal Democrats with radical ideas. And they’ll bring labor unions.” These two potentialities were so abhorrent that he paused to look out over the Honolulu he loved so well. “Why don’t the people down there trust us to know what’s best for these islands?” he asked in some bewilderment. “You’d think they’d bear in mind all we’ve done for Hawaii. Why, they ought to rise up as one man and kick outfits like Gregory’s or California Fruit right into the ocean. But they never seem to appreciate what’s best for them.”

  His secretary interrupted to say, “That young Japanese is trying to see you again,” and Hale shook his head furiously.

  “Not me! Negotiating with labor is Hewie’s problem,” and he ducked out a back door, calling for Hewlett Janders. When the big man appeared, Hale commissioned him: “See if you can handle this young troublemaker once and for all,” and he felt some assurance as big Hewie hitched up his belt and went forth to battle.

  When Janders entered the board room he found there a confident, crop-haired, smiling young man who extended his right hand across the table and said, “I’m Goro Sakagawa, sir. I remember how good you were to my brothers.”

  The gesture caught big Hewie Janders off guard, and for a fleeting instant he thought: “This is the brother we didn’t take into Punahou. If we had, he’d never have grown up to be a labor leader.” Then he dismissed the thought and said sternly, “What is it you wish to see me about, young man?” Pointedly, he did not ask Goro to sit down.

  Displaying some of the polish he had acquired while serving with General MacArthur in Japan, Goro ignored the fact that he had to remain standing and said, “They tell me your son Harry was killed on Bougainville.”

  “He was,” Janders replied, and that made it necessary for him to ask, “Wasn’t one of your brothers killed in Italy?”

  “Two,” Goro replied, and somehow each of the negotiators realized that Hewlett Janders of The Fort had been subtly brought down to Goro Sakagawa’s level. They were equal, and Goro said, “You asked why I wanted to see you. I’ve been nominated by the men at Malama Sugar …”

  “I won’t discuss a labor union.”

  “I haven’t said anything about a labor union,” Goro pointed out, shifting from one foot to the other while Hewlett slumped back in his chair.

  “What else would you want to talk about?” Janders snapped.

  “All right, since you bring the matter up, Mr. Janders. Malama Sugar is going to organize …”

  “Get out!” Janders said abruptly, his voice rising even though he remained seated.

  Quietly Goro replied, “Malama Sugar is going to be organized, Mr. Janders. Under federal law we are entitled …”

  “Out!” Janders shouted. Leaping to the door he called for his assistants, and when they had piled into the room he commanded: “Throw this communist out.”

  Goro, even stockier than he had been in high school, braced himself against the table and spoke quickly: “Mr. Janders, I’m not a communist and I’m not going to let your people throw me out, because if they did I’d have a court case against you. Then your position on the union would harden, and we’d have even more trouble discussing things intelligently. So call the dogs off.”

  “I will never accept a union,” Janders cried. “And don’t you ever come stomping back into this office.”

  “Mr. Janders, I promise you that the first plantation we organize will be Malama Sugar, and when we reach the final negotiations I will sit in this chair …” Goro reached for a chair, lifted it carefully and set it down in position. “This chair. Save it for me, Mr. Janders. The next time we meet here will be to sign papers. The name’s Goro Sakagawa.”

  He left the room quietly and Janders dismissed his aides. Slumping into his chair he tried to understand what had happened: “A Japanese field hand stomped into my office and told me …” He collapsed in incredulity and called for Hoxworth Hale.

  “How’d it go?” Hale asked.

  “A Japanese field hand stomped into my offic
e and told me …”

  “Quit the dramatics, Hewie. What happened?”

  “They’re going to organize Malama Sugar.”

  “They’ll never make it,” Hale said firmly. He summoned The Fort and told his men, “Hewie’s had a bad ten minutes. Young Sakagawa tipped his hand …”

  “He stomped in here and tried to tell me …”

  “Hewie!” Hale interrupted. “He didn’t try to tell you. Damn it all, he told you.”

  “They’re going to organize Malama Sugar,” Janders repeated. “And if they succeed there … then they’ll try the rest.”

  “This has come sooner than I expected,” Hale observed. “When we beat back our Russian communists in the strikes of 1939 and 1946, I figured we had them licked. But apparently the dreadful Roosevelt virus has infected our entire society.”

  “But I never expected to see the day,” Janders mumbled, “when a Japanese field hand could stomp into my office …”

  Hard, competent Hoxworth Hale, who from behind the scenes had masterminded the two preceding fights against the union, now began marshaling his forces. Rapping on the table he said, “We shall present a unified force against them, and if anyone of you in this room wavers, we will show no mercy. On the one hand, the Japanese radicals will overwhelm you. And on the other, we’ll ruin you. No credit. No common merchandising. No legal support. Gentlemen, you stick with us or you perish.” He stopped, glared at the men, and asked, “Is that agreed?”

  “Agreed,” the plantation men muttered, and the strike was on.

  When policies had been set and the meeting adjourned, the plantation owners stood nervously about the room, unwilling to leave, and Hale asked, “How did a decent young man like Goro Sakagawa, with three brothers in Punahou, become a communist?”

  Janders replied, “I think he was assigned to the A.F. of L. in Japan.”

  A pall settled over The Fort. John Whipple Hoxworth mused: “To think that our government took a decent Japanese boy and instructed him in labor tactics!” Something of the world’s maniacal contradiction seeped into the room and mocked the managers, and Hoxworth Hale asked sadly, “You mean that a boy who might have gone to Punahou was perverted by our own government?” On this gloomy note the first meeting of The Fort’s strike committee ended.

  Actually, when Hewlett Janders accused Goro Sakagawa of being a communist he was not far from the truth. When The Fort, in 1916, 1923, 1928, 1936, 1939 and 1946, refused point-blank even to discuss unionism and used every known device including force and subversion to block labor from attaining any of its legitimate ends, it made normal unionization of the islands impossible. The hard-hitting but completely American union organizers sent out from the mainland found that in Hawaii customary procedures got nowhere. Not even the vocabulary of unionism was understood, or acknowledged where it was understood, so that both The Fort and the Honolulu Mail invariably referred to any union activity as communism; as a result, over the course of years Hawaii developed its own rather strange definition for terms which on the mainland were understood and accepted as logical parts of modern industrial life. In brief, unionism was subversion.

  There were also physical difficulties. Oftentimes mainland men whom the course of history proved to have been rather moderate labor organizers were refused entrance to the islands. If they tried to talk to plantation hands they were bodily thrown off the premises. If they tried to hire a headquarters hall, none was allowed them. They were intimidated, vilified, abused and harassed by charges of communism.

  In obedience to Gresham’s Law of social change, when the moderates were driven out, the radicals moved in, and from 1944 on, a group of ultra-tough labor men quietly penetrated the islands and among them were many communists, for they had seen from afar that the situation in Hawaii made it a likely spot for the flowering of the communist creed. Among the leaders was a hefty, ugly Irish Catholic from New York named Rod Burke, who had joined the Party in 1927 and who had steadily risen in its ranks until he had reached a position of eminence from which he could be trusted to lead a serious attack upon Hawaii. His first step was to marry a Baltimore Nisei, and this Japanese girl, already a communist, was to prove of great assistance to him in his grand design for capturing the islands.

  For example, when Rod Burke met Goro Sakagawa, returning to Hawaii after his instructive labor experiences in Japan, Burke instantly spotted the capable young army captain as the kind of person he required for the unionization and subsequently the communization of Hawaii.

  So Burke said to his Japanese wife, “Get young Sakagawa lined up,” and the dedicated Nisei girl succeeded in enlisting Goro not as a communist but as a labor organizer, and through him Burke conscripted other Japanese and Filipinos without confiding to them his membership in the Communist Party. In this way a solid-core labor movement was founded which in 1947 stood ready to confront The Fort and fight to the rugged, island-breaking end.

  In later years Goro Sakagawa often discussed these beginnings with his lawyer brother Shigeo, back from an honors degree at Harvard, and he allowed Shig to probe his motives and understandings as they existed in early 1947. “Did you know then that Rod Burke was a communist?” Shig asked.

  “Well, I never knew for sure, but I guessed he was,” Goro explained. “He never gave me any proof. But I recognized him as a tough-minded operator.”

  “If you had these suspicions, Goro, why were you willing to hook up with him?”

  “I realized from experience that old-style methods would never break The Fort. We tried reasonable unionism and got nowhere. Burke knew how to apply power. That’s the only thing The Fort understood.”

  “Did Burke ever try to sign you up in the Party?”

  “No, he figured he could use me and then dump me in favor of the dumber Japanese and Filipinos he did sign up in the Party,” Goro explained.

  “How did he select his men?”

  “Well, he picked them up where he could. Started enlisting Japanese who didn’t know too much … Filipinos too. But they were just for support. The real guts of the Party was Rod Burke and his wife.”

  “Where did that leave you?” Shig explored.

  “I figured just like Burke,” Goro explained. “I figured I was smart enough to use him and then dump him.”

  “Must have been a very interesting period,” Shig said wryly.

  “There were no illusions on either side,” Goro confessed. “Funny thing is that my wife, Akemi, figured the Burkes out the first time she saw them. She’d come up against a lot of communists in Japan, and she spotted Mrs. Burke instantly. And I think Mrs. Burke spotted her, so nobody was fooled,” Goro assured his brother.

  “Did Burke sign up any really good men?” Shig asked.

  “Well, most of the Japanese were dopes, pure and simple, but Harry Azechi was as able a man as we ever produced in the islands.”

  “Looking back on it, Goro, do you think the alliance was necessary?”

  Goro had often thought about this, especially since he had known so intimately the moderate A.F. of L. men on General MacArthur’s team, and he concluded: “If you remember the position taken by The Fort … that even a discussion of labor was communism … Hell, Shig, I’ve told you about the time I went in to see Hewlett Janders. He made me stand like a peasant with my cap in my hands. Abused me, ridiculed me. Shig, there was no alternative.”

  “None?” his brother asked.

  “None. Hawaii could never have moved into the twentieth century until the power of The Fort was broken. I alone couldn’t have done it. The A.F. of L. men I knew in Japan couldn’t have done it. Only a gutter fighter like Rod Burke could have accomplished it.”

  So when Hewlett Janders announced to the Honolulu Mail that mainland communists were endeavoring to capture the islands, he was right. And when he charged that Japanese had joined the Party under Rod Burke’s leadership, he was also correct. But when he said that the leader of the plantation part of the strike, Goro Sakagawa, was also a communist, he was
not right, but in those tense years the hatred of labor was so great that a relatively minor error like that didn’t really matter.

  The strike was a brutal, senseless, tearing affair, and it frightened Hawaii as nothing previous had ever done, not even the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Rod Burke moved swiftly to tie up the waterfront so that not a single H & H ship entered Hawaii for five and one half starving, agonized months. The Fort retaliated by cutting credit, so that everyone in the islands felt the pinch.

  Goro Sakagawa led his sugar-plantation workers out on strike. The Fort retaliated by suspending all sorts of benefits, so that soon it was not the workers who felt the cruelty of social warfare, but their families.

  Rod Burke allowed no cargoes of either sugar or pineapple to leave the islands and no tourists to come in. The Fort retaliated by closing two of its hotels, and the maids and waiters thus thrown out of work were less able to weather the strike than were the hotel owners.

  Goro Sakagawa got the pineapple workers to join the strike. The Fort coldly announced that its food-supply warehouses were nearly empty and it could no longer distribute to stores like Kamejiro Sakagawa’s, so one shopkeeper after another faced bankruptcy.

  No man can understand Hawaii who does not understand the great strike. It crippled the islands to the point of despair. Newsprint ran low and the existence of the papers was threatened. Food diminished to the one-week mark, and many families went hungry. Sugar plantations saw their crops rotting in the parching sunlight. Pineapple fields went untended, and millions upon millions of unrecoverable dollars were lost. Banks watched their normal flow of business halted. Big stores had neither new stocks nor old customers. Doctors went unpaid and dentists saw no patients. The major hotels could serve only inadequate foods, and the very life of the islands ground slowly to a halt.

  For a strike in Hawaii was not like a strike in Florida. It was like nothing the mainland ever knew, for in Florida if the waterfront was tied up, food could be imported by train, and if the trains were closed down, men could use trucks, and if they were struck, hungry families could organize car caravans, and if they failed, a desperate man could walk. But in Hawaii when the docks were tied up, there were no alternatives, and the islands came close to prostration. Reasonable industrial relations having proved impractical, stupidity on the part of both capital and labor nearly destroyed the islands.