With the stability of American sovereignty, Lorrin Andrews Thurston began a long slow mellowing from walleyed firebrand to a leading private citizen who steadily advanced the interests of the territory. During the years of the provisional government he had remarried (his first wife having died in childbirth) and with annexation, aged forty, he stood down from active politics and bought the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, an admirable platform from which to pursue his projects. Some of them came to nought. After World War I he backed legislation to restrict the activities of Japanese-language schools, but the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down. He was ahead of his time in trying to ban billboards, but he was prescient in the promotion of tourism as a contributor to the islands’ economy. Thurston understood the economic boon that shiploads of sightseers, especially from the mother country, would bring to Hawai‘i. He was an amateur vulcanologist, and as a boy on Maui he had often led tourists up the ten-thousand-foot ascent of Haleakala. Now he was instrumental in creating Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.
Also important to developing tourism in the territory was a visit in 1907 by America’s most celebrated writer, the novelist and social critic Jack London. The recent author of The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea-Wolf (1904), and White Fang (1906) felt that he had exhausted the literary possibilities from his gold-seeking trek to the Yukon, and had come in search of a whole new universe of story ideas. He sailed to Hawaii in his own thirty-five-foot yacht, the Snark, with his wife and a small crew, having (rather dangerously, but typically for him) taught himself navigation while en route.
Thurston, vigorously seconded by Lucius Pinkham, secretary of the Board of Health, importuned London to visit Moloka‘i and the much-maligned leper colony there, and write a piece showing that it was not the hopeless hellhole it was commonly believed to be. Indeed, as London himself had neared Honolulu and the Snark entered the Kaiwi Channel, they passed Moloka‘i and London pointed it out to his crewman Martin Johnson as the most cursed spot on earth. Now London accepted Thurston’s challenge. He and his wife, Charmian, crossed the channel to Kalaupapa and stayed two days, celebrating the Fourth of July with its residents, practicing on their shooting range with them, and interviewing the doctors and nurses. They were impressed with the colony’s superintendent, Jack McVeigh, who in five years’ residency had stemmed the slide into drunken despair. London gratified Thurston with a brave, frank article under the title “The Lepers of Molokai” in a leading magazine, the Woman’s Home Companion, depicting the colony in a more positive light. It was, according to Thurston, “a value to Hawaii that cannot be estimated in gold and silver.”
Also in London’s crew on the Snark, however, was another young man named Bert Stolz. Once in Honolulu he revealed to London that his purpose in working for his passage to Hawai‘i was to visit the grave of his father, Deputy Sheriff Louis Stolz, shot down by a native named Ko‘olau, who had been diagnosed with leprosy, evaded capture, and hidden in the mountains of Kaua‘i for more than two years, until his death.6 In response London wrote the short story “Koolau the Leper,” which depicted in London’s famously clinical style the horrors of the disease and the terror of natives desperate to avoid capture. Thurston was furious with him, referring to him as a “sneak of the first water, a thoroughly untrustworthy man and an ungrateful and untruthful bounder,” turns of phrase that Lili‘uokalani might well have used of Thurston.
Of greater importance to Hawai‘i’s fledgling tourism industry, Jack London also discovered surfing. It had been a royal sport for generations, the massive size and weight of those early surfboards providing sufficient testimony to the strength of those who indulged. Mark Twain was aware of its existence during his visit in 1866, and wrote of its pursuit as lunatic. During the missionary period it had declined, along with chants, hula, and other aspects of the native culture. As headline-making celebrities, London and his wife were lodged in a beach house at Waikiki near the Swimming Club, with whose members he became familiar. Electrified at his first sight of surfing, he determined to teach himself but made a failure of it for over an hour. His efforts were spied by Alexander Hume Ford, a South Carolina journalist who had been traveling to Australia, stopped in Hawai‘i to see if he could learn to surf, and had never left. He gave London the necessary tips and launched him onto a likely wave, which London rode, breathless, all the way to the beach. “From that moment,” he wrote, “I was lost.” Again for the Woman’s Home Companion, he wrote “A Royal Sport: Surfing in Waikiki,” describing the sight of a native surfer:
And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward … appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing white. His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his limbs—his feet planted in the churning foam, the salt rising to his knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight, and he is flying through the air, flying forward.… He is a Mercury, a brown Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea.7
Once he learned how, London surfed for hours, whooping, unable to come in from the blistering tropical sun. He was bedridden for the next four days with what the doctor called the worst sunburn he had ever seen, but his article and the force of his celebrity behind it firmly established surfing as part of Hawai‘i’s identity.
A. H. Ford, for his part, shortly sought funding from Queen Emma’s estate to establish the Hawaiian Outrigger Canoe Club, which was founded on May 1, 1908, with surfing as an integral part, neighboring the Moana Hotel. Their facility boasted dressing rooms and a traditional grass hut for storing surfboards. The club thrived, and began staging competitions with the already ongoing hui nalu, a native surfing group that regularized its existence in 1911. One of its founders, Duke Paoa Kahinu Kahanamoku, was only just beginning a long career of spreading the gospel of surfing. He carried it to Australia in 1915 and caused a sensation there, while another surfer whom London wrote about in his article, the Irish-Hawaiian George Freeth, gave a demonstration in California at the invitation of Henry Huntington to promote one of his railroads. On his return visit to Hawai‘i in 1915, London was stunned to see that the Outrigger Canoe Club had grown to more than twelve hundred members. Hawaiian tourism was on its way.
While in Hawai‘i in 1907 London also became friends with Prince David Kawananakoa. The two went fishing by torchlight, one of many experiences that London had in Hawai‘i that caused him to rethink his previous advocacy of “racialism,” which was supplanted by an appreciation of the native culture. Kawananakoa at thirty-eight was in the last year of his life before the family hopes would fall on his small son—but Lili‘uokalani was still very much alive, although bitter8 and usually reclusive within Washington Place. She did respond to invitations to state occasions and events that she thought important for the unity of her people, although the rebuke of her presence could dampen a festive atmosphere. A famous photograph captures her seated, her hair now quite white, with Sanford Dole and territorial governor Lucius Pinkham, brought together for a concert to promote the Allied cause in World War I. Standing behind them is Henry Berger, for forty years conductor of the (Royal) Hawaiian Band. They all look miserable. The legislature had voted her a pension of four thousand dollars per year and the income from a large sugar plantation that had belonged to her brother—but she did not regard that as much compared to the losses for which she repeatedly sued, without success.
On their return visit to Hawai‘i in 1915, Jack and Charmian London were presented to her at a New Year’s Day party. Charmian was struck by the former queen’s “narrow black eyes [which] gave the impression of being implacably savage in their cold hatred of everything American.… I offered her a dubious paw, which she touched gingerly, as if she would much prefer to slap it.”9 Lili‘uokalani was seventy-nine when she passed away on November 11, 1917, and was accorded a state funeral and interment in the Kalakaua vault at Mauna ‘Ala. Little remarked in the American press was the death of another elderly lady in Hawai‘i on December 20, 1928, which marked the end of
an era. Elizabeth La‘anui Pratt was ninety-four, great-grandniece of the Conqueror and last surviving graduate of the Royal School. Late in her life she wrote a paean to her great-great-grandfather titled Keoua, Father of Kings, a precursor of literary interest in Hawaiian royal history and genealogy.
Considering that Hawaiian annexation was far less about sugar than it was about denying a coaling station to a frightening new generation of Japanese battleships, the United States was quite slow to actually develop Pearl Harbor. Blowing up the coral bar to the lochs and scooping out a channel two hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep began in 1900, followed by massive dredging to deepen the harbor. An actual naval base was not authorized until 1908, when some port facilities and a drydock were begun. This first attempt at a drydock was nearly completed when it spectacularly collapsed, and World War I had come and gone before it was fixed and finished. United States neutrality in the early years of that conflict reinforced Hawai‘i’s critical location, as German vessels called freely to resupply. German ships then in port were impounded with America’s sudden entry into that conflict in 1917.
The international naval disarmament treaty of 1925 drew attention away from Pearl Harbor, but loss of confidence in that agreement preceded massive development starting in 1931 into a fully serviced fleet anchorage. By the end of that decade, with Europe again embroiled in war, Pearl Harbor fulfilled Captain Mahan’s vision of it as America’s forward defense bastion—not that it did them much good on December 7, 1941.
* * *
In one tragic way, the thirties also reminded the native Hawaiians that they had become strangers in their own land, as a sensational murder provided an object lesson in mainland-style justice for dark-skinned people. On the night of September 12, 1931, navy wife Thalia Massie, who did not like to drink or dance, accompanied her submariner husband Thomas and several of his friends to the Ala Wai Inn, a restaurant and dancing venue in Waikiki.10 Late in the evening one of his friends said something fresh to Thalia; she slapped him and left, intending to make her way home alone. She was beaten and alleged that she was raped by a carload of locals: two Japanese, one Chinese-Hawaiian, and two Hawaiians. It was not the joyriders’ only incident that evening, and after being apprehended for the other trouble they quickly fell under suspicion for the Massie assault.
Adm. Yates Stirling, a Southerner commanding Pearl Harbor, was frank in his assessment that some rope and a strong tree would see justice done. At trial, however, want of evidence resulted in hanging the jury instead. Of five whites and seven nonwhites on the panel, there were five votes to convict, seven to acquit. The American community was outraged. Thalie Massie’s mother, Grace Fortescue, rushed out from the mainland to comfort her daughter. After the trial, in company with her son-in-law and others, they seized, beat, and shot dead Joe Kahahawai, who was visibly the darkest of the rape defendants. Grace Fortescue, Thomas Massie, and others were apprehended with Kahahawai’s body wrapped in a sheet, intending to dump him off Koko Head. They were tried for murder, defended by Clarence Darrow, convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years. Admiral Stirling, however, brought pressure to bear on the territorial governor, Lawrence Judd, who commuted their sentences to one hour to be served in his office. Race relations in Hawai‘i probably reached their lowest ebb ever as the kanakas realized what American justice would mean for them. Of equal significance, the scandal set the campaign for statehood back by decades—not because of any perceived deficiency in the justice system, but because it caused members of Congress to question whether it was any benefit to the country to admit a state populated by violent, dark-skinned people.
At about the time the Massie trial ended, an effort to promote mainland tourism to Hawaii went into high gear with entry into service of the sleek, white, 26,000-ton ocean liner SS Lurline of the Matson Line.11 She, other ships, and eventually airliners disgorged paying passengers who were garlanded with leis, hosted at luaus, entertained with hula (which was sanitized, no longer scandalous, but an exotic tourist attraction)—and who never had a clue what their hosts might be thinking.
Race relations came to the fore in a different way during World War II, because about one-quarter of the population of the islands was of full or partial Japanese ancestry. On the West Coast, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and concentrated into internment camps; in Hawai‘i that was simply not workable. They were questioned, and watched, and lived under martial law, but ironically those of Japanese ancestry in the only part of the nation to suffer a major attack had a far easier lot than those thousands of miles in the rear. Ultimately, most Japanese-Americans who volunteered for the war were formed into the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and were sent to Europe, where there would be no question of friendly fire; they saw their fiercest action in the Italian campaign. After the war one tally revealed that of all Hawaiian service members killed in battle, four in five were of Japanese ancestry—an imperishable monument to valor and patriotism.
In fact, during the next run made for statehood in 1946, the congressional report allowed that according to both army and navy intelligence, “not a single act of sabotage was committed by any resident of Hawaii before, during, or after the attack on Pearl Harbor.” The report went on to acknowledge “the important patriotic service rendered, under the most critical conditions … by all citizens of Hawaii, regardless of racial origin.” The U.S. Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion the same year, when it finally ruled (rather after the fact) that wartime martial law in the territory had been unconstitutional, and was based on “the mistaken premise that Hawaiian inhabitants are less entitled to constitutional protection than others.”
When statehood finally came in 1959, it was attended by some lovely ironies. The last-appointed territorial governor, Republican and Anglo William F. Quinn, was elected first governor of the state, to be sworn in by Justice Masaji Marumoto. The former speaker of the territorial House of Representatives, Hiram Fong, who had been an energetic leader in the campaign for statehood, was elected one of the state’s first two (and the nation’s first Asian-American and first Chinese-American) senators to go to Washington—where his seat was directly across the aisle from Strom Thurmond’s. James Kealoha, the state’s first lieutenant governor, was Chinese-Hawaiian; to the House of Representatives in Washington they sent Daniel Inouye, a Japanese-American war hero who lost an arm in Italy and won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Thus Hawai‘i entered finally the American union with its full ethnic rainbow in display.
After a decade of statehood, interest in Hawaiian language and culture led in the islands to what became known as the Second Hawaiian Renaissance, the first having been the resuscitation of native culture by Kamehameha V and Kalakaua. One inspiration for it was the writing, publishing, and cultural advocacy of an articulate and reflective hapa haole, John Dominis Holt. A trustee of the Bishop Museum and chief of Topgallant Publishing, Holt was 45 when his essay On Being Hawaiian appeared in 1964. His was an appropriate voice, as his heritage contained a thorough mixture of ancestries, and he was born at a time when his own parents were less than eager to relate his Hawaiian genealogy. Equally at home in New York or Europe, Holt supported the revival of Hawaiian arts, and was himself the author of a novel and several short stories, a treatise on traditional featherwork, and a history of the monarchy that was as insightful as it was all too brief.
Because of his recognition that pre-haole Hawai‘i was in fact no paradise, that some practices from the old days had been rightly discarded, and his stance that all of Hawai‘i’s past and its influences contain elements that can be salvaged to fashion a healthy modern culture, Holt came to be disparaged by the more radicalized element of the cultural renaissance.12 By the time of his death in 1993 he had won a place at the table, but the fact was that his literary interpretation of the Hawaiian mixed-blood experience, which is to say the experience of a majority of the islands’ people, fought uphill to gain the recognition of academia and the new cultural elite.
The c
ultural renaissance, as it grew, was all too often “highly fragmented and contains little sense either of unity among Hawaiians or of cross-cultural harmony within the wider society.”13 The way of aloha all too often goes wanting in the resentments expressed about the past—and the history itself often seems poorly understood by the angriest of partisans. In a time-transport back to those days, a native Hawaiian would stand 999 chances in 1,000 that he or she would be a fisherman and taro digger, even more impoverished than now, and, subject to chiefly whim or sacrifice, tied to a tree and strangled. That does not excuse the overthrow, which was indefensible. But political appeals to Hawai‘i’s history could use a reality check. There were no good old days.
To the independence movement after the turn of the twenty-first century, the boot heel of oppression is increasingly seen in virtually every aspect of the American presence, no matter how much respect was intended. One scholarly article published in 2005 savaged construction of the Waikiki War Memorial and Natatorium, dedicated in 1927, and criticized it on the ground that only eight Hawaiians had died in combat during World War I; for the monument to commemorate the lives of the further ninety-three Hawaiians who died of illness or accident while in American or British service was allegedly designed to exaggerate Hawai‘i’s participation, and is therefore a monument to American domination. One suspects, however, that if the monument had honored only the eight battle dead, and ignored the other ninety-three, the criticism would have been even more shrill. The same article also lamented that the memorial occupies the site of the Papa‘ena‘ena heiau (the Pacific War Memorial), and thus mourned the loss of an important native religious site—never mind that the heiaus were destroyed on the order of Queen Ka‘ahumanu and the chief priest, Hewahewa, before any missionaries arrived, let alone that its loss had nothing to do with Americans or World War I. One might further note that after the Battle of Nu‘uanu Pali in 1795, Kamehameha sacrificed the conquered ali‘i of Oahu at this heiau, an aspect of native religious practice that does little to validate today’s wash of nostalgia. The article even sees the monument’s heroic Western architecture as an insult to its Pacific location, despite its being within the vernacular of worldwide memorial design at the time. A monument to Hawai‘i’s war dead constructed of traditional thatched grass could have been equally criticized for paying them little regard.14 Modern times cannot put a foot right when it comes to the old days.
Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii Page 39