The Mechanization and Modernization (M&M) Agreement of 1960 was an agreement reached by California longshoremen unions: International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), and the Pacific Maritime Association. This agreement applied to workers on the Pacific Coast of the United States, the West Coast of Canada, and Hawaii. The original agreement was contracted for five years and would be in effect until July 1, 1966. ILWU signs Mechanization and Modernization Agreement, which pioneers the tradeoff of members’ job security for the employers’ right to introduce labor-saving equipment. On September 22, 1959, King visited Punahou at the invitation of President John Fox. At an Academy Chapel, he preached to our students on the “Three Dimensions of Life,” a topic that he would return to repeatedly during the struggle for civil rights. While we don’t have the precise text he used that day, in later versions of the same sermon he reflected on the vital interrelationship between self-acceptance, love of others, and faith in God. Most crucially, King called on his audience to cultivate a spirit of gratitude and recognition of interdependence that might allow them to “rise above the narrow confines of . . . individual concerns.” “This is what God needs today,” he emphasized, “men and women who will ask, ‘What will happen to humanity if I don’t help?’”

The Hawaii Democratic Revolution of 1954 was a nonviolent revolution that took place in the Hawaiian Archipelago consisting of general strikes, protests, and other acts of civil disobedience. The Revolution culminated in the territorial elections of 1954 where the long reign of the Hawaii Republican Party in the legislature came to an abrupt end, as they were voted out of the office to be replaced by members of the Democratic Party of Hawaii. The strikes by the Isles’ labor workers demanded similar pay and benefits to their Mainland counterparts. The strikes also crippled the power of the sugarcane plantations and the Big Five Oligopoly over their workers. Hawaii had a dominant-party system since the 1887 revolution. The 1887 Bayonet Constitution took most of the power away from the monarchy and allowed the Republican Party to dominate the legislature. Besides a brief change of power to the Home Rule Party following annexation, the Republicans had run the Territory of Hawaii. The industrialist Republicans formed a powerful sugar oligarchy, the Big Five. During the controversial Kahahawai murder and trial Republicans displayed their power by reducing the 10-year sentence for manslaughter to one hour. Many felt the trial was a failure of justice from political forces. But this was not the only case of the government’s abuse of power; past misdeeds were mainly centered around economic gain. Among the unhappy residents of Hawaii was John A. Burns, a police officer during the trial.^[1]Burns founded a movement by collecting support from the impoverished sugar plantation workers. He also restored strength to the divided and weak Democratic Party of Hawaii.  After the war, Burns was able to gain support from Japanese American veterans of the 100th and 442nd returning home.^[5] He encouraged the veterans to become educated under the G.I. Billand to run for public office. Daniel Inouye, who would become a very prominent US senator, is considered the first of the veterans he recruited and was a prominent member of the movement. Hall and Kawano’s strikes resumed after the war. The ILWU helped to organize the plantation workers spreading unionization from the sea to the land. This allowed the movement to organize general strikes in the sugar industry and pineapple industry, not just strikes at the docks. The Hawaiian sugar strike of 1946 was launched against the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association and the Big Five leaving the cane fields derelict. The 1947 Pineapple Strike followed on Lanai but ended in failure and was tried again in 1951. The 1949 Hawaiian Dock Strike froze shipping in Hawaii for 177 days, ended with the territorial Dock Seizure Act.^[6]

As the movement developed the more communist components began to show through. The strikes were increasingly politicized and at the 1949 strike the White Republican aristocracy who were owners in the Big Five became concerned over the communist trend by workers.^[7] On October 7, after the 1949 dock strike that year, the territorial legislature requested the House Un-American Activities Committee to investigate the strikes that had become frequent in the territory.^[8] On August 28, 1951, the FBI rounded up seven members of the movement^[9] including Jack Wayne Hall, Charles Fujimoto (chairman of the Communist Party of Hawaii), and Koji Ariyoshi (editor of the Honolulu Record), who had also published pro-communist work. The Hawaii 7 were charged under the Smith Act for conspiring to overthrow the government; all were released by 1958. The first Congressional bill for Hawaii statehood was proposed in 1919 by Kuhio Kalanianaole,^[28] and was based upon the argument that World War I had proved Hawaii’s loyalty.^[29] It was ignored, and proposals for Hawaii statehood were forgotten during the 1920s because the archipelago’s rulers believed that sugar planters’ interests would be better served if Hawaii remained a territory.^[30] Following the Jones-Costigan Act, another statehood bill was introduced to the House in May 1935 by Samuel Wilder King but it did not come to be voted on, largely because FDR himself strongly opposed Hawaii statehood,^[31] while “Solid South” Democrats who could not accept non-white Congressmen controlled all the committees.^[32] Hawaii resurrected the campaign in 1940 by placing the statehood question on the ballot. Two-thirds of the electorate in the territory voted in favor of joining the Union.^[33] After World War II, the call for statehood was repeated with even larger support, even from some mainland states. The reasons for the support of statehood were clear: Hawaii wanted the ability to elect its own governor; Hawaii wanted the ability to elect the president; Hawaii wanted an end to taxation without voting representation in Congress; Hawaii suffered the first blow of the war; Hawaii’s non-white ethnic populations, especially the Japanese, proved their loyalty by having served on the European frontlines; Hawaii consisted of 90% United States citizens, most born within the U.S. A former officer of the Honolulu Police Department, John A. Burns, was elected Hawaii’s delegate to Congress in 1956.^[34] A Democrat, Burns won without the white vote but rather with the overwhelming support of Japanese and Filipinos in Hawaii. His election proved pivotal to the statehood movement. Upon arriving in Washington, D.C., Burns began making key political maneuvers by winning over allies among Congressional leaders and state governors. Burns’ most important accomplishment was convincing Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson (D-Texas) that Hawaii was ready to become a state, despite the continuing opposition of such Deep Southerners as James Eastland^[35] and John Sparkman. In March 1959, both houses of Congress passed the Hawaii Admission Act and U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it into law. On June 27, 1959, a plebiscite was held asking Hawaii residents to vote on accepting the statehood bill. The plebiscite passed overwhelmingly, with 94.3% voting in favor.^[36]On August 21, church bells throughout Honolulu were rung upon the proclamation that Hawaii was finally a US state. 

Though the ground was eroding beneath his feet as ILWU membership dwindled, Jack Hall continued to be a major player in Hawai‘i. Sanford Zalburg, his biographer, recalls that it was not unusual when Hall summoned other (p.332) leading figures like John Burns, Art Rutledge, and Daniel Inouye to his abode and “laid down the law to them.” When presidential candidate Richard Nixon arrived in Honolulu in 1960, he met with Hall in Kapiolani Park. “I know,” said Hall’s spouse. “I drove him up there. I was laughing all the way. It was just like cops-and- robbers,” she recalled, recounting their dodging the press. “He wanted me to take the most devious route.”141 Nixon, a renowned anticommunist, was chagrined about feeling compelled to kiss the ring of a reputed Red, which explained why Yoshiko Hall delivered her husband to him via a circuitous route. Her intentional misdirection was not unique to her. Typically, the union wrong-footed its opponents; for example, in 1956 Bridges registered as a Republican, which “really confused and confounded a lot of people out of our ranks,” a pleased Hall wrote to Goldblatt, adding: “Good Stuff.”142

Fighting in Paradise: Labor Unions, Racism and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawaii (Gerald Horne, 2011) 

This introductory chapter discusses the background of Hawaii’s labor movement, in particular the International Longshore and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) and its ties to the Communist Party. It details the dock workers’ strike in June 1953, roughly three years after the United States embarked on a bloody war on the Korean peninsula and Hawaii became a primary point of departure for supplying the battlefield of this anticommunist conflict. It argues that the prolonged repression of workers contributed to pent-up resentment that burst forth with the efflorescence of labor organizing, notably by the ILWU. In 1953, Hawaii had a population of about 500,000, and the ILWU membership was about 24,000, including the stevedores—soimportant for the unloading of merchandise in the island chain that was 2,400 miles from North America. Because of the varied influences of seafarers who frequently visited these islands and stevedores influenced by the ILWU, Hawaii long had developed a justified reputation for working-class consciousness, which the union was able to parlay into major gains.

The workers kept coming, streaming in rivulets of protest. These men—they were mostly men— were predominantly of indigenous Hawaiian, Filipino, and Japanese origin and were departing angrily from the docks of pleasant Honolulu and balmy Hilo and the plantations of Kaua‘i and Lana‘i. It was in the early afternoon in mid-June 1953, roughly three years after the United States had embarked on a bloody war on the Korean peninsula and Hawai‘i had become a primary point of departure for supplying the battlefield of this anticommunist conflict. Yet these men who numbered in the thousands were protesting, since their union leadership and the Communist Party leadership, which were thought by their adversaries to be equivalent, had been convicted on anticommunist grounds of violating the notorious Smith Act. The docks, usually a beehive of activity in light of the jolt provided by war contracts, were strangely silent, as if the men had been summoned by a modern Pied Piper. Though closer to Osaka than Boston and considered relatively isolated, the ports of Hawai‘i were among the most efficient in the world when it came to handling cargo, and with harbor entrances directly facing the Pacific Ocean, their importance increased as military tensions waxed in Korea – then Vietnam – and tensions rose accordingly. 

In protest of the conviction of the seven leftist leaders, and, most particularly, their leader. – Jack Hall – stevedores voted quickly to virtually double their wage demands in current contract negotiations. Ships were being stranded in port, and sugarcane and pineapple began to decompose in the field. This was not the first time that Hawai’i workers had gone on strike in reaction to a slight against a presumed Communist. The same thing occurred in August 1950 after the jailing of these workers’ union leader, the Australian-born Harry Bridges, head of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), based in San Francisco. Then about 10,000 workers went on strike; this time the workers decided to up the ante, as 20,000 walked out. The influence of figures like Bridges caused Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who took a keen interest in the territory’s affairs, to claim in 1956 that “‘the power of the Communists in Hawaii is a thousand times stronger than it is in the continental United States.’

Many of the Filipinos had experience in one of the more sophisticated guerrilla operations in this planet’s history—the fabled Huk Rebellion35—and Tokyo had long been the site of vigorous and thriving socialist and Communist movements that dwarfed their counterparts in the United States. When the Hawai‘i Communist leadership was placed on trial in 1952, the prosecution introduced an article penned by the legendary Sen Katayama, who had been a founder of the Communist Party in the United States in addition to being a leader of the party in Japan. In the article, he termed Hawai‘i as “the strategic knot of the Pacific” and “the most important strategic point in the Pacific Ocean”; given that fact, he was elated to note, “Among the Japanese workers in Hawaii there was a group which was long under the influence of the Japanese revolutionary movement. The members of this group came chiefly from the Japanese islands of Riu-Kiu [Ryukyus], where, at one time, the Japanese Workers and Peasants Party (which supported the CP [of] Japan and was dissolved by the government in 1928) had a strong influence.”36 An article retained by Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska spoke dramatically of a “Japanese Communist Master Plan” in pursuit of the “Japanization of Hawaii.” This scheme “progressed so well,” said the writer, “that a notable Communist, Hozumi Ozaki, succeeded in penetrating to become an unofficial advisor to the Japanese Cabinet on the eve of Pearl Harbor. He was a trusted intimate of Prince Fumimaro Konoye, the Premier.” As he saw things, it was the CP in Tokyo—not Moscow—that “threatens the entire world.”37 Weeks before war erupted on the Korean peninsula, Senator Butler received from Hawaiian attorney James Coke a picture with a caption he found disturbing: “200,000 … in the Imperial Plaza in Tokyo to hear Japan’s Communist Party leader, Sanzo Nozaka, deliver his May Day Address.”38

Many of the most militant workers in Hawai‘i hailed from the radical region singled out by Katayama. “I’m an Okinawan,” said Yasuki Arakaki, one of the more dedicated of ILWU members during its pre-statehood heyday. “As I was growing up, I knew I was not Japanese. I was not treated as Japanese.” Like minorities worldwide who felt a deep sense of grievance—including African-Americans on the mainland—this helped to generate within him a fierce progressivism. “So when a person is discriminated [against] …, you have a feeling of fighting back, you know.” Thus, he continued reflectively in a 1991 interview, “if you see today, many of the business people on the Big Island [Hawai‘i], the Kaneshiro family, the Food Fair, and many of the merchants in Honolulu, the Star Market, many of the markets [are owned by] Okinawans. And Okinawans[,] because they are discriminated [against], they stick together and help each other out.” Once he had a would-be sweetheart whose mother compelled (p.6) her to reject him, “‘because you’re an Okinawan,’” he was informed curtly. He was “deeply hurt[,] naturally,” as he felt like a “low-class Japanese.” But dialectically, he said, “that gave me some impetus to prove that I’m not a leper. I’m going to prove to her and others that I’m equal or better”39—which he did by becoming one of the leading unionists in the archipelago, as did other similarly situated Okinawans.

Contemporary Euro-American writer Susanna Moore, who grew up in pre-statehood Hawai‘i, has asserted that in Hawai‘i “there was a fairly unconscious racism all around us” and also quite a bit of this bile that was (p.12) “institutionalized” in the form of “restrictions and bylaws that kept non-haoles not only from private clubs, but from certain neighborhoods.” In that era this praxis was largely ‘unquestioned’ – at least by the White minority. Senator Butler of Nebraska discovered this when he began his post–World War II assessment of whether Hawai‘i should become a state. Lucile Paterson, a resident of Honolulu informed him that the “much bruited racial integration and mutual respect” was “largely a myth”; she perceived an “undercurrent of hostility against the haoles or whites by the mixed Oriental population.” As she saw it, the “numerous ‘hoodlum attacks’” then capturing headlines were symptomatic of “Orientals vs. haoles” since the latter were targeted in her eyes. “My son is an excellent barometer,” she said with regret. “He came here totally unaware of ‘race’ as such [but] he has already acquired a wary manner in his dealing with Orientals of his own age and has finally accepted the fact that he is a ‘damn haole.’”75 When Senator Butler held confidential hearings in 1948 in Honolulu on the prospects for statehood, he was greeted with an outpouring of nervous sentiment from whites who, despite their privileged position, complained repeatedly about racial harassment. Like many of the witnesses, Francis D. Houston opposed statehood—if Hawai‘i, why not Fiji? he asked querulously —and asserted that white sailors and soldiers were special victims of physical attacks, as if, to non-haoles, they were symbols of the colonial status that Hawai‘i endured. “Non-haoles [would] catch a haole sailor alone and beat him up.

Though historians have cast serious doubt on the alleged disloyalty of Japanese-Americans during the Pacific War, many whites disagreed vehemently. (p.13) Martin E. Alan, who told Senator Butler of his wonderment as to why so many white Communist men—including Smith Act defendants Jack Hall and John Reinecke and, ultimately, Bridges himself—were married to women of Japanese origin also claimed that farmers of Japanese origin in Hawai‘i had stopped growing vegetables after 7 December 1941 in order to sabotage the war effort. Alan also declared that “from 1920 to 1940 an average of $1,200,000.00 annually was sent to Japan by the nationals here, in the form of gold and silver coin.” As he recalled things, “Planes and submarines made regular and periodic visits here [from Japan] until the very end of the war in 1945. It’s all hogwash about the loyalty of the Niseis [Japanese-Americans] and the aliens,” as there “were acts of sabotage, plenty of them.” But now, he asserted, those of Japanese origin had shifted from allegiance to Tokyo to allegiance to Moscow, for “Communism is working through At the time, there were also pressing regional matters that occupied the grave attention of the archipelago generally. For at that juncture France was exploding nuclear devices in the South Pacific, frighteningly close to Hawai‘i’s shores. The awesome and deadly mushroom cloud was seen by residents of Honolulu as the sky was lit hellish red: how could the union ignore foreign policy or the world beyond the United States, given such threats?78

Because of the diversity of its membership, the union had to be alert to the exchange rate of the dollar with the yen and the Filipino peso. Unsurprisingly, Miyagi was trying to establish closer ties with Asian unions, a matter that was facilitated by the fluency of certain members in Japanese and other languages. Still hanging fire as statehood approached was the question of whether union stevedores would be allowed to unload military material destined for foreign battlefields – 450 tonnes of dynamics was the explosive matter at issue in late 1957. Continuing a long-standing pattern, the ILWU’s most significant global engagement was with Cuba. Shortly after the Cuban Revolution—and just before statehood—Jeff Kibre was seeking a meeting with sugar workers there, but nothing jelled, he reported. “Castro is moving in several different directions at once,” he said, “apparently trying to appease our State Department while at the same time pushing for domestic reforms.”85 Just before that, the ILWU had displayed its solidarity with those seeking to dislodge the US-backed regime when it refused to confer with a Cuban sugar agent in Hawai‘i; the agent was affiliated with a firm that McElrath described as having “the largest holdings of sugar in the western hemisphere”—yet the union, he said, “could not and would not rub shoulders with Cuban sugar.”86

Though the ILWU was castigated by its detractors as being in a relationship of ventriloquism with Moscow, this accusation hardly jibed with what the Record had to say at the time of the 1956 uprising in Budapest; unlike many Communist parties globally, Ariyoshi’s journal was quite critical of the Soviet intervention. Of course, the Left’s focus on global events centered mostly not on Europe but on Asia. A writer who dwarfed the influence exerted by Davis and Ariyoshi said as much. James Michener became an outspoken advocate of statehood in the postwar era, just as his writings about the South Pacific set the tone for a renewed interest in this region and its diversity. He met the Dixiecrats head-on, constructing the isles as a positive symbol of multiracialism that were an alternative to the messiness of Little Rock. As he saw it, statehood would reassure Asians about the racial bona fides of Uncle Sam; further, he saw Hawai‘i as helping to heal his homeland’s nasty racial sores, as mediators between those defined as black and white…‘United States of America and Some Small Specks Far West?’” he asked sarcastically. Reverend Donald J. Ely of Baltimore (p.327) was of like mind. If Hawai‘i were to be crowned a state, then why not “Guam, the Virgin Islands and even South Vietnam”; Oregon was bad enough, he thought, he said, with its “two leftists” in the “Upper Chamber”—“I wish it could be sunk in the South Pacific,” he scoffed. And Hawai‘i would just contribute to this mess, he said, informing Senator J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina that “if everyone would take a firm [stand] against so-called civil rights (actually special privileges for Negroes), as you do, we would not be having the trouble we do today.”107

On March 16, 1962, the Pacific Coast Marine Firemen, Oilers, Watertenders and Wipers Association (MFOW) union called a strike and on April 11, 1962, under the Taft-Hartley Act, a federal injunction was issued to stop the strike. After lengthy court battles, an agreement was reached, with the union gaining numerous concessions, including “overtime in port, pension benefits, wages, vacation, and welfare benefits.

Hawaii was stumbling into statehood at a time when the left-wing press, which could have provided needed clarity to these tumultuous and transformative events, was slipping into remission and the mainstream press was wallowing in a combination of distortion and obliviousness. Not least because of how the ILWU had altered the political economy, Hawaii, as statehood loomed, was enduring significant change that too could have benefited from sharper analysis. The number of registered vehicles doubled in a six-year period following 1947 and accelerated thereafter, and an inevitable outgrowth was more accidents. According to Baer, ‘car wrecks from drunk driving in the early hours of the morning and killing on the highways can be attributed to service men’ for they seemed to think that ‘they can do as they please in this far outpost.’ Land was becoming so expensive in O’ahu – a plaint for some time – that people of modest means were being priced out of the market. The availability of potable water was becoming an unceasing problem – ironically enough in the middle of an ocean. Tourism and nightlife were increasing, turning a sleepy island paradise into something approaching Las Vegas in the Pacific. Baker recalled a time when Honolulu had little in the way of street lighting and no nightclubs, taverns, or cocktail lounges, only ‘saloons’. One of two of them catered to high-class trade, but most of them were frequented by waterfront bums, castaways or perhaps an occasional Hawaiian whose wife was giving him a bad time – but now that moguls like Henry Kaiser were taking an interest in the islands, this was changing. Thus, between 1950 and statehood, tourist spending jumped 350 percent, from 24 million dollars to 109 million annually, while the number of tourists increased from 34,000 in 1945 to 243,000 in 1959. The press baron of Los Aneles, Norman Chandler, was frequenting the islands nowadays, according to Honolulu mogul Lorrin Thurston, who was now enticing J.B. Stoddard. “He has a fabulous oil income” Thurston gushed and was ‘seeking investments ‘ – Hawaii seemed as inviting as anywhere else, it was thought. ..Ariyoshi noticed a proliferation of nude parties on the beaches of paradise. 

Yet it seemed that the ILWU had to reassure the doubting who feared that admitting Hawai‘i into the sacrosanct Union would be akin to giving the Kremlin the keys to the federal car—and the way to provide such reassurance was to make concessions as a sign of good faith as the union’s long-pursued goal of statehood loomed ever closer. Opponents of statehood on the mainland, particularly in the former slave South, were in a similar quandary. Rejecting Hawai‘i as a state was viewed widely as a Cold War faux pas, designed to offend Asians, but accepting the archipelago was viewed not only as a gift to the Kremlin, which was thought to dominate Honolulu, but more importantly as an act that would bring two anti–Jim Crow senators to Washington, at a time when massive resistance to desegregation was rising.

The Liberal 1950s? Reinterpreting Postwar American Sexual Culture (Joanne Meyerowitz) 

In her 1988 book Homeward Bound, Elaine Tyler May drafted the outline of this now-common interpretation. May borrowed the word “containment” from foreign policy of the Cold War and repositioned it as a broader postwar cultural ethos that applied as well to gender and sexuality. In May’s influential rendition, middle-class Americans saw uncon- trolled sexual behavior as a dangerous source of moral decline that would sap the nation’s strength. In postwar America, she wrote, “fears of sexual chaos” made “non-marital sexual behavior in all its forms . . . a national obsession.” Various officials, experts, and commentators “believed wholeheartedly,” she claimed, in “a direct connection between communism and sexual depravity.” Accordingly, they attempted to police sexual expression and “contain” it within marriage.1 Over the past two decades, other historians have followed May’s lead, elaborat- ing on the Cold War “containment” of sexuality and suggesting its impact on policy, politics, citizenship, masculinity, femininity, and sexual behavior. And yet they have simultaneously undermined the “containment” thesis. As they expanded their base of evidence, they stretched the dominant interpretation and poked a passel of holes—sometimes inadvertently—in the story it tells.

Mounting historical evidence now suggests that the postwar years were not as conservative as sometimes stated. In 1988, the same year that May published Homeward Bound, for example, John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman presented a somewhat different argument. In Intimate Matters, they accepted the sexual conservatism of postwar American culture but also posed the postwar years as a time of “sexual liberalism.” For D’Emilio and Freedman, sexual liberalism involved “contradictory patterns of expression and constraints.” It “celebrated the erotic, but tried to keep it within a het- erosexual framework of long-term monogamous relationships.” With this formulation of moderate liberalism, they pointed to limited change dur- ing a conservative era. Since the publication of May’s and D’Emilio and Freedman’s books, other historians have made more direct assaults on the notion of postwar sexual “containment.” In her 1999 book, Sex in the Heartland, Beth Bailey wrote of an increasingly “sexualized national cul- ture” in the postwar years, with a rumbling “dissonance” between “public norms and . . . private acts.” In colleges, she found, young adults engaged in “widespread covert violation” of conservative sexual norms, and college offi- cials retreated from earlier policies that aimed to enforce sexual abstinence.

Just as World War I introduced Americans to Europe, making an indelible impression on thousands of farmboys who were changed forever “after they saw Paree,” so World War II was the beginning of America’s encounter with the East – an encounter whose effects are still being felt and absorbed. No single place was more symbolic of this initial encounter than Hawaii, the target of the first unforgettable Japanese attack on American forces, and, as the forward base and staging area for all military operations in the Pacific, the “first strange place” for close to a million soldiers, sailors, and marines on their way to the horrors of war. But as Beth Bailey and David Farber show in this evocative and timely book, Hawaii was also the first strange place on another kind of journey, toward the new American society that began to emerge in the postwar era. Unlike the largely rigid and static social order of prewar America, this was to be a highly mobile and volatile society of mixed racial and cultural influences, one above all in which women and minorities would increasingly demand and receive equal status. With consummate skill and sensitivity, Bailey and Farber show how these unprecedented changes were tested and explored in the highly charged environment of wartime Hawaii. Most of the hundreds of thousands of men and women whom war brought to Hawaii were expecting a Hollywood image of “paradise.” What they found instead was vastly different: a complex crucible in which radically diverse elements – social, racial, sexual – were mingled and transmuted in the heat and strain of war. Drawing on the rich and largely untapped reservoir of documents, diaries, memoirs, and interviews with men and women who were there, the authors vividly recreate the dense, lush, atmosphere of wartime Hawaii – an atmosphere that combined the familiar and exotic in a mixture that prefigured the special strangeness of American society today.

The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority (Ellen D. Wu, 2014) 

The Second World War irrevocably altered the place of the United States in the global arena. American history, of course, had never been free of foreign entanglements despite the isolationist streak firmly embedded in the nation’s political culture. Continental expansion, the dispossession of Native peoples, the claim to the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence with the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the annexation of Hawai‘i, and the conquest of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam as spoils of the Spanish-American War in 1898 were all building blocks of US empire. Yet the United States had remained relegated to the second tier of the international pecking order dominated by the European powers before the 1940s. It was not until its anointment as one of “Big Three” Allies that the United States came to be considered—and accepted its responsibilities—as the preeminent world leader. And it was also at this moment that the Asia Pacific region vaulted into a vital geopolitical preoccupation for US officialdom.1

These momentous shifts in the United States’ international position and its foreign policy priorities undergirded an overhaul of the nation’s racial alignments. In the American West and Hawai‘i since the mid-nineteenth century, the various immigrant streams from Asia had been racialized together as the “yellow peril”—an alien menace courted for its labor yet despised for its purportedly unbridgeable cultural distance from white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. With the nation’s entry into World War II, however, the conflation of separate ethnic groups as Orientals lost its political purchase. Most saliently, the battles in the Pacific theater forced the disaggregation of Japanese and Chinese American racialization and social standing; the two could no longer be lumped together into one undifferentiated horde. In the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing, middlebrow magazines famously published tutorials on “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs.” 

In one direction, World War II saw the culmination of the Asiatic Exclusion regime with the removal and incarceration of 120,000 Pacific coast Nikkei (individuals of Japanese ancestry), two-thirds of whoo were US citizens, and half of who were children under age eighteen. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ostensibly race-neutral Executive Order 9066, signed on February 19, 1942, authorized the secretary of war to “prescribe military areas … from which any or all persons may be excluded.” The mandate was selectively applied to Japanese Americans in Washington, Oregon, and California—a decision justified by federal authorities on the unsubstantiated grounds that all Japanese Americans were potential fifth columnists by virtue of blood alone. Beginning on March 31, Issei, Nisei, and Sansei (first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants, respectively) left their homes, farms, “businesses, and communities for sixteen temporary “assembly centers.” By November 1, all had moved again, this time to ten long-term “relocation centers,” or concentration camps, in remote locations from Idaho to Arizona to Arkansas. The US Supreme Court upheld the legality of evacuation and detention for the sake of “military necessity” in Hirabayashi v. United States (1943), Yasui v. United States (1943), and Korematsu v. United States (1944). In authorizing, executing, and defending the constitutionality of mass imprisonment, the state effectively classified each and every ethnic Japanese in the United States as “enemy aliens,” thereby meriting the utmost instantiation of political and social ostracization.3”

“Besides market share and electoral pull, Leong pitched the significance of Chinese America and the Chinese News at the high-stakes level of international relations. He donated five hundred copies of the Chinese News, for instance, to the China Club of Seattle, a staunch advocate of Sino-American amity, undoubtedly in hopes of attracting subscribers, yet also to show “Chinese-American enterprise in the field of reflecting the problems, progress, and opinions of the Chinese-Americans, a small but important group in the overall field of Chinese-American relations.”102 This was the point in the March 1953 editorial favoring the admission of Hawai‘i to statehood. The entrance of the majority Asian-populated territory to the Union would likely result in the election of Chinese Americans to the US Senate and House of Representatives, the Chinese News conjectured. Diplomatically, the payoff would be huge: “In this uncertain unpeaceful [sic] era of the Pacific cycle in American global growth, Congress can skilfull [sic] use the opinions and backgrounds of any qualified American of Asian ancestry in U.S. foreign policy.”103 Leong forwarded the piece to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, alerting him to the “potential value of the Asian-American” for foreign affairs, adding, “We hope that our editorial comments may be of some service to you in your program and as a magazine dedicated to public service we shall be happy to … furnish you any other type of data relating to the over-all question.”104 This was his 1950s’ rebuttal to the decades-old question “Does My Future Lie in China or America?” in which the rendering “of Chinese Americans as valuable transoceanic intermediaries would be a boon for their citizenship aspirations, America’s Cold War objectives, magazine sales, and Leong’s own professional cachet—a win-win-win-win situation.”

On witnessing the commendable showing on the European front by the Hawaiian-Nisei men of the 100th Battalion (who had begun active duty in August 1943), the military deliberated whether or not to conscript additional Nisei. After a protracted debate, the War Department announced the reinstatement of selective service for Japanese Americans in January 1944; draftees would serve as replacements for the 442nd.28” “Scores of photographs displayed “American soldiers with Japanese faces”—including the famous Kuroki—in the field, at rest, and on leave. Besides the 442nd and 100th, the publication also featured Japanese Americans serving in the Marines, Coast Guard, and Women’s Army Corps, and snippets of articles from newspapers and magazines around the country praising enlisted Nisei.37 The mainstream media proved amenable to this campaign. Just days after the military announced that it would begin to draft Nisei, Life featured “American hero” Yoshinao “Turtle” Omiya, a Hawai‘i-born veteran blinded in combat. The same week, both the Los Angeles Times and Time ran celebratory profiles of Kuroki, stressing his Americanism. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine, Crisis, editorialized that “our fellow citizens of Japanese ancestry … deserve every line” of this publicity, lamenting only that African American soldiers were not receiving the same type of favorable reporting. These depictions suggest that the liberal notion of accepting Japanese Americans as members of the national community had started to gain a toehold among white and black Americans during the latter part of the war.”

“Nisei delegates successfully swayed their colleagues to incorporate Japanese American–specific planks into the platform: immediate statehood for Hawai‘i, blanket compensation for internees’ losses moving beyond the limitations of the JACL-backed Evacuation Claims Law, and the right to naturalization for Issei.” Americans have long been enamored with Hawai‘i as paradise: lush flora and fauna, dreamy topography, and  temperate clime. Beyond these natural splendors, Yankee fantasies have also latched on to the exoticism of the islands’ people and their putative culture, especially the notion of a welcoming, feminized, and sexually available aloha spirit. This imagination has operated to justify the United States’ continued domination of the archipelago since the mid-nineteenth century.1 By the early twentieth century, this fascination had come to encompass the idea of Hawai‘i as a racial paradise.2 In the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals began to tout the islands’ ethnically diverse composition—including the indigenous population, white settler colonists, and imported labor from Asia and other locales—as a Pacific melting pot free of the mainland’s social taboos on intermingling.”

After World War II, the association of Hawai‘i with racial harmony and tolerance received unprecedented national attention as Americans heatedly debated the question of whether or not the territory, annexed to the United States in 1898, should become a state. Statehood enthusiasts tagged the islands’ majority Asian population, with its demonstrated capability of assimilation, as a forceful rationale for admission. Americans everywhere heralded Hawai‘i as a model for race relations as well as a valuable meeting ground between East and West. With the Cold War in full swing, sketching the territory as proof of American multiracial “democracy at work” and a vital link to Asia proved to be a winning strategy. Hawai‘i became the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959.”

Hawai‘i’s bid for statehood occupies a central place in the story of the origins of the model minority, paralleling and reinforcing critical changes in the racialization of continental Asian Americans. Like the postinternment reconstruction of Nikkei as heroic soldiers and “Quiet Americans” along with the far-flung praise for Chinatown’s exemplary families and nondelinquent children, the statehood campaign was one of the most high-profile sites for remaking the image of Asian Americans after World War II, capturing the interest of countless individuals in the arenas of formal politics and mass culture.3 Given that Americans conceived of Hawai‘i as a distinctly “Eastern” space in the 1940s and 1950s, the statehood question served as a national referendum on the problem of post-Exclusion Asiatic race and citizenship—a symbolic proxy for Asian Americans’ place in the nation. Through admission coupled with the sending of ethnic Japanese and Chinese representatives from the state of Hawai‘i to the US Congress, Americans came to regard people of Asian ancestry as model minorities. Statehood, in short, emblematized the nation’s investment in the emergent paradigm.”

Until World War II, many—if not most—Americans could not fathom Hawai‘i’s entry into the Union, given its physical distance from the continent, its sizable Asian presence, and the struggle between the United States and Japan for domination in the Pacific. But with Hawai‘i’s importance as a battleground during the war and new diplomatic imperatives after 1945, Cold War liberals repitched the islands’ Oriental Problem as a geopolitical asset. That the vast majority of the US population approved of statehood by the late 1940s and early 1950s suggests that many people accepted the logic of racial liberalism and were willing to reposition the boundaries of the national community to include persons of Asian ancestry. While contemporaries celebrated Hawai‘i’s admission as the moment elevating “Oriental citizens” to “full equality,” this act of inclusion generated its own constellation of racial exclusions affecting Native Hawaiians, African Americans, and Asian Americans themselves. As with the concurrent processes of transmuting Asian Americans into model minorities on the mainland, statehood was both a solution to the conundrum of reconfiguring the nation’s racial order in the mid-twentieth century and a seed for new dilemmas of racial management that would plague the nation in the post–civil rights era.

Hawai‘i’s Oriental Problem

Hawai‘i’s racial makeup precluded any real possibility of statehood before the 1940s. White planters had little interest in altering the territorial status that enabled them to horde the islands’ wealth and power. The oligarchy and its mainland allies regarded Hawai‘i’s Asiatics as a menace on several fronts: economic, social, political, and military. In myriad ways, whites’ construction of Hawai‘i’s Oriental Problem mirrored anti-Asian animus in the US West. Opposition to statehood therefore can be understood as a facet of the Asiatic Exclusion regime spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” The roots of Hawai‘i’s Oriental Problem lay in the Māhele—literally, “division”—of 1848, the revolutionary privatization and redistribution of land masterminded by New England missionary-merchants (or haole in local terminology). At the expense of indigenous peoples, the haole elite acquired substantial tracts that it aimed to transform into industrial sugar plantations. But doing so required cheap and plentiful labor. The rapid decimation of the native population since the introduction of Western diseases in the late eighteenth century and intractability of those who survived obliged growers to look offshore for workers. Consequently, from the 1850s through the 1930s, plantation owners recruited over four hundred thousand laborers to the islands, mainly from China, Japan, and the Philippines, with smaller numbers from Portugal, Korea, Puerto Rico, Norway, Russia, Germany, Spain, and various Pacific islands.4

Whites and Native Hawaiians felt ambivalent about the influx of Far Eastern workers. Asiatic immigration, of course, had made possible the large-scale cultivation of sugar. The independent Hawaiian kingdom had actually encouraged labor recruitment, hoping that an uptick in the Asian population would offset haole domination. Nonetheless, haole and some natives expressed apprehension of an Oriental invasion, leading the Kingdom to pass its own apprehension of an Oriental invasion, leading the Kingdom to pass its own version of US Chinese Exclusion laws in 1886. This hostility extended to the exploding Japanese population, brought in as a replacement labor force. Anti-Asian antagonism by the late 1890s infused the annexation deliberations. Americans who desired the formal colonization of the islands by the United States warned of the “danger of Asiatic ascendancy” and urged their compatriots to preempt a takeover by Japan. Annexation’s detractors concurred that the islands were disturbingly Orientalized, but drew the opposite conclusion: that the yellow peril necessitated that the United States abandon its imperialist designs, lest Hawai‘i seek statehood in the future.”

Anti-Japanese acrimony in Hawai‘i reached its terrible crescendo after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. On the evening of December 7, 1941, the army imposed martial law on the entire territory. Japanese Americans bore the brunt of this rule, subjected to unparalleled levels of surveillance and restrictions on working and everyday living. For their part, Japanese Americans sought to convince their fellow islanders of their exclusive loyalty to the United States by participating in the war mobilization, sponsoring the Speak American Campaign, and jettisoning all personal displays of Japanese culture. None of this, however, was enough to reverse the military’s orders to close Nikkei institutions and incarcerate nearly fifteen hundred Japanese American elders. Hence, at the outset of World War II, the prognosis for statehood seemed highly improbable.11

Hawai‘i’s Unorthodox Race Doctrine

Although Hawai‘i’s Oriental Problem commandingly structured haole-Asian relations in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, it was never all pervasive. From the 1920s onward, religious leaders, intellectuals, and social commentators furnished a competing discourse by touting the islands as variously a racial frontier, racial laboratory, and racial paradise where the Asiatic presence was innocuous, if not beneficial. Their diagnoses established the liberal position on race in Hawai‘i—a standpoint that would prove critical to the admission argument after World War II. The beginnings of this alternate framework can be traced to white American missionaries who feared that domestic discord on the Pacific coast negatively impacted their overseas conversion attempts. Consequently, they attempted to disprove popular beliefs that “Orientals” were incapable of assimilating to American life—the ideological core of anti-Asian xenophobia. To do so, they enlisted the expertise of social scientists, including Robert E. Park of the University of Chicago, author of the influential “interaction cycle” Theory—positing competition, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation as the four stages of encounter between two groups—to understand why Asians had been unable to move beyond the conflict stage.12”

To answer this question, elite thinkers looked to Hawai‘i, “the one place where [racial] injustice does not glare.” Its seeming tranquillity despite its diversity, especially its usually high rates of interracial marriage, suggested the possibility of intercultural accord everywhere. Intellectuals perceived the islands as “the ultimate racial laboratory,” where the end stage of the race relations cycle (assimilation) had already been reached. Chicago School sociologists and their scholarly descendants—especially the University of Hawai‘i’s sociology department—soon developed a preoccupation with Hawai‘i’s unique culture of intermingling. Led by University of Hawai‘i professor Romanzo Adams, social scientists upheld the romance of the islands as racially enlightened, in spite of the haole-planter ruling class. Adams attributed the origins of the “unorthodox” “doctrine” to the native Hawaiian ethos of aloha (reciprocal love and generosity) and willingness of Anglo-American settlers to abide by such a code.13

In advancing the racial equality thesis, social scientists posited a radical departure from exclusionists’ claim that Orientals were funda“mentally incompatible with American culture and democracy. They assumed that Asiatic assimilation was both the normative and inevitable outcome of contact between Asians, Hawaiians, and whites in the crucible of Hawaiian society. Their research proved that Asian islanders had embraced “occidental culture,” as indexed by growing numbers of voters and middle-class professionals, an increase in residential dispersion, and rising rates of intermarriage. As one concluded, “They are oriental in appearance, but not in reality.”14”

“Intellectuals’ advocacy efforts mirrored an analogous focus in the popular press. Akin to the social scientists, journalists and commentators depicted Hawai‘i as a racial paradise that fostered a culture of assimilation characterized by the commonplace of interracial marriage and mixed-race peoples. The ethnic and religious conflicts of the 1930s and World War II provided fertile ground for this idea to flourish. In June 1942, Life magazine featured a pictorial of individual women representing Hawai‘i’s various racial “combinations,” such as Filipino Chinese, Hawaiian white, and Hindu Dane, meant to depict Hawai‘i as a “melting pot bubbling comfortably to produce a fine healthy stew.” The photo spread was based on the research of Swedish race biologist William W. Krauss, who located in Hawai‘i “an atmosphere of interracial peace and harmony.” In recounting his findings, Life joined the growing chorus proposing that Hawai‘i’s amicable relations be upheld as “a striking object lesson in racial accommodation” for other nations beset with strife.16”

“This emphasis on unflinching devotion to the United States became a mainstay of the popular media’s examination of the statehood bid. Newspapers agreed that the political sympathies of Hawai‘i’s Japanese were no longer in doubt, thereby removing any reservations about admission.24 Scores of periodicals acclaimed these “Jap-Yanks” for their loyalty “beyond question.”25 Nonfiction works by dedicated racial liberals reiterated the same points to mainlanders, including Lind’s monograph Hawaii’s Japanese (1946) and Hawaii: The 49th State (1947), a mass-market book by Reader’s Digest editor Blake Clark, one of Nikkei’s most passionate supporters. Clark gushed that Japanese Americans “stand today as the nation’s strongest single testament to the fact that Americanism is not a matter of race, color, or religion, but of the heart. Sakamaki, Shimogaki, Awakuni, Nakahara—they have the American heart!”26”

“The statehood debate picked up as proponents couched the notion of Hawai‘i’s distinctive racial environs as a potential asset for American diplomacy in the troubled Pacific. Asia contributor Elizabeth Green contended that Hawai‘i’s people, with their “peculiar qualifications of heritage, birth and upbringing,” were especially equipped to “go out as interpreters of East and West alike, to East and West alike, on a mission of rational human understanding of vast future significance.” Writing for American magazine in 1937, Webb Waldron echoed this vision, asserting that Hawai‘i’s entry into the Union might prevent war between the United States and Japan.17”

“When the war broke out, the Japanese Question finally left the realm of speculation. Home front efforts of such groups as the all-Japanese Honolulu Civic Association and Varsity Victory Volunteers of the US Army Corps of Engineers coupled with the European theater service of the all-Nisei 100th Infantry Battalion (which later merged with the 442nd Regimental Infantry) provided indisputable evidence of Japanese Americans’ allegiance to the United States for many on the islands and in the nation at large.19 By the closing months of the war, popular opinion had strikingly evolved. “Our American citizens of Japanese ancestry have acted in uniform and out of uniform, in daily occupation and in the stress and test of battle, just as have our Americans of other ancestries. The basic argument against admission … has been answered,” declared the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in February 1945.20”

“World War II, then, radically altered the social, cultural, and political terrain on which the statehood question would be fought after 1945. Nikkei sacrifice inspired the resolution of Hawai‘i’s Japanese Question. In the name of antifascism and national unity, liberal leaders and thinkers promoted cultural pluralism as a desirable and appropriate ethos modeled most effectively by Hawaiian society. Hawai‘i itself came to be seen by Americans as an integral part of the nation—a point ardently underscored by the Pearl Harbor attack. Too, its geographic location had rendered it the sensible launching point for US troops deployed throughout the Pacific as well as a site of defense industry growth, and the war years witnessed the circulation of tens of thousands of mainlanders through the islands. All these dynamics coalesced to increase an awareness of Hawai‘i and its significance among the general public. Moreover, the military’s suspension of constitutional rights under marital law convinced many locals that only statehood could guarantee such a scenario would not be repeated in the future. And emboldened by their contributions to the war effort, the territory’s Asian Americans—not only Japanese, but also ethnic Chinese, Filipino, and Korean residents—felt more entitled than ever before to political equality and first-class citizenship, and looked to admission as the key to securing their aspirations. This confluence of factors animated statehood advocates, who looked to the postwar years in anticipation of imminent victory.21”

Cold War Contradictions

While the events of World War II greatly improved Hawai‘i’s chances for admission, statehood was far from being an open-and-shut case after 1945. The start of the Cold War introduced new considerations that galvanized stakeholders on both sides of the debate. Most decisively, anti-Communism and race defined the postwar negotiations. As powerful but also malleable languages, they simultaneously functioned as the main catalysts for reworking Hawai‘i’s Oriental Problem into diplomatic advantage and blunt instruments with which detractors perennially frustrated entry. The political contradictions resulting from the ability of the opposing factions to appropriate the two concepts for their respective ends were major factors that protracted the decision-making process. In fact, of the thirty-seven territories considered for statehood after the original thirteen, Hawai‘i was “the most thoroughly studied, the most exhaustively investigated, and the most frequently rejected by Congress.”30”
“As the Soviet-American rivalry picked up in the late 1940s, admission’s foes latched on to a likely means to cloud the campaign. The rise of organized labor in postwar Hawai‘i set the stage for the debates’ own Red Scare as detractors bent anti-Communism to fit their designs. Union membership in the territory boomed after agricultural workers gained the right to collective bargaining in 1945. As the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen Union (ILWU) rapidly expanded its membership rolls—going from nine hundred members in 1944 to thirty-three thousand two years later—it began to rival the Big Five in political influence. Voting with their feet as well as their ballots, ILWU workers helped to elect an unprecedented number of liberals to local office, inaugurating a shift in the territorial balance of power away from the traditional Republican-haole elite that culminated in the “Democratic Revolution” of 1954. Large-scale strikes in the late 1940s provided statehood opponents with potent ammunition to raise McCarthyist objections to entry. Decriers charged that the territory had fallen under the “firm grip” of Communists and admission would cede control of Hawai‘i’s government to the Kremlin.31”

“Critics inflated these accusations by joining them to older yellow peril fears. Racializing antilabor and anti-Communist sentiments was easy to do; the vast majority of the rank and file came from Japanese or Filipino ancestral backgrounds. Some suggested that local American-born Chinese elected to the future state legislature would be manipulated by Red China, or that the “Japs” who “control[l]ed” the islands would infect the US Congress and American society with “Asiatic concepts of life.” Even worse, statehood might provide the catalyst for Hawai‘i’s Chinese and Japanese to “merge under the banner of Communism,” and together undermine US global leadership—an “unthinkable” outcome.32” “But race—like anti-Communism—could work in favor of statehood as well as against it. Nearly everyone who weighed in on the issue agreed that the isles were markedly “Oriental.” Detractors, of course, posited this as a political and social burden. For promoters, in contrast, the archipelago’s Far Eastern roots were a huge selling point in the context of the worldwide decolonization movement and nascent Soviet-American duel. To review briefly, for many in Asia and Africa, World War II was a fight against not only fascism but also imperialism, with occupied peoples struggling to unseat their colonial masters. Chapter 11 of UN Charter, cosigned by the United States in 1945, declared the signatories’ duty “to develop self-government” in their territories. In light of this agreement, Hawai‘i’s colonial relationship with the United States—like stateside racial inequality—posed a problem for America’s geopolitical tug-of-war with the Soviet Union. President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights maintained that international relations ranked as one of three reasons impelling the nation to fix its “domestic civil rights shortcomings.” Should the nation fail to act, the United States’ adversaries would hasten “to prove our democracy an empty fraud, and our nation a consistent oppressor of underprivileged people.” Truman responded by including Hawai‘i statehood in his comprehensive agenda for racial reform. “The present political status of our Territories and possessions impairs the enjoyment of civil rights by their residents,” he declared before Congress in February 1948. Without this change, the United States might well lose the Cold War.33”

“Statehood supporters presciently anticipated these concerns. In 1946, the territorial government reactivated the prewar Hawaii Equal Rights Commission as the Citizens’ Statehood Committee (CSC). The committee accented the global implications of statehood in its publicity literature, promising that entry would serve as a “concrete example of self-determination influencing all the peoples of the Pacific.” The following year, the Citizens’ Statehood Committee morphed once more into the Hawaii Statehood Commission. Based in Honolulu and Washington, DC, the Hawaii Statehood Commission coordinated an extensive, formalized drive for statehood from 1947 to 1959. During this time, the commission persistently lobbied every member of Congress, disseminated as many as forty thousand individual promotional items annually, and communicated regularly with federal officials and agencies, businesses, civic organizations, educational institutions, national magazines, and over seventeen thousand newspapers.”

“Proponents depicted Hawai‘i as a place with enormous ambassadorial potential, given that the ancestries of Hawai‘i’s inhabitants essentially endowed them to serve as the ideal brokers between the United States and the Pacific world. Supporters wielded an eclectic assortment of metaphors to configure the territory as an indispensable bond to millions in Asia: a “gateway,” “springboard,” and “logical stepping stone” to the East; a “hub” and “meeting ground”; a “funnel” through which Eastern and Western “influences” traversed in both directions; and the “catalyst” joining Orient and Occident. Most typically, enthusiasts depicted Hawai‘i as some form of “bridge”—whether as a “bridge of understanding,” a “cultural and political bridge to the Orient,” or a “strong bridge with the people of the yellow race.” As with justifying statehood in terms of anticolonialism and civil rights reform, the concept of Hawai‘i as a racial, cultural, and geographic borderland looked to forward the United States’ Cold War agenda of wooing the newly independent third world nations to its camp. “Hawaii’s Americans of Oriental ancestry are a strong, urgent reason for Statehood, rather than the reverse,” territorial congressional delegate John A. Burns insisted. The United States’ relations with Asia would only grow in importance in the postcolonial era, and no group was better equipped or better positioned to forge these ties.36” “Statehood’s backers envisioned the pinnacle of this brokerage to be the election of Asian Hawaiians to the US Congress. Inverting the exclusionist trope of the Oriental senator, the Hawaii Statehood Commission avowed that immediate admission would “immeasurably benefit the Union” by installing legislators with “an intimate knowledge of the Pacific ocean area at their fingertips.”
“In these narratives, Hawai‘i’s distinctiveness stemmed from not only its Far Eastern heritage but also its harmonious race relations. Mass-circulation magazines entrenched the racial paradise ideal in the public imagination and provided a rhetorical resource on which the statehood campaign could draw. Life’s November 1945 photo essay “Hawaii: A Melting Pot” exemplified this vein of representation. Life dubbed Hawai‘i “the world’s most successful experiment in mixed breeding … unmatched in today’s world for interracial tolerance and affection.” The captions suggested that the islands’ diversity rendered “prejudice” unfeasible. Accompanying pictures featured white-Chinese, Japanese-Hawaiian, Filipino, and black-Japanese families; a motley Boy Scout troop; and head shots of pretty young women in a multitude of racial combinations (Portuguese Irish Hawaiian and Korean Spanish English). These illustrated the birth of “the new mixed race of Hawai‘i—tolerant, healthy, and American,” while also neutralizing fears of interracial marriage by depicting this integration as feminine, exotic, and sexually desirable.38”

“In effect, Fong and Inouye became not only the representative faces of Hawai‘i but also stand-ins for Asian America in its entirety. Their rise to prominence greatly advanced the crystallization of the model minority concept in the 1960s. Fong personified the rags-to-riches American meritocracy ideal, prompting the media to label him a “Hawaiian Horatio Alger.” Various profiles applauded the determination of this son of immigrant sugarcane laborers to “lift himself out of poverty” from a young age by peddling newspapers, shining shoes, and delivering poi. By his own account, Fong worked his way through his undergraduate studies at the University of Hawai‘i, saving just enough to attend Harvard Law School, and then returned home with “10 cents in my pocket” to found his own firm. He diversified his pursuits by running for a seat in the territorial legislature, twice succeeding in 1938 and 1941. With the outbreak of World War II, Fong interrupted his budding political career to serve in the US Army Air Force. After his stint in the military, he returned to government, serving as Hawai‘i’s speaker and vice speaker of the House. Incredibly, Fong also found time to preside over multiple business ventures “serve in the US Army Air Force. After his stint in the military, he returned to government, serving as Hawai‘i’s speaker and vice speaker of the House. Incredibly, Fong also found time to preside over multiple business ventures in real estate, finance, and bananas, among others.75 On the eve of his swearing in, Pageant magazine eulogized that this “American success story” was “clear proof that racism has no permanent place in America.” Fong concurred, “I hope that the American people will see my life as symbolic of the opportunity offered only in a democratic society such as ours.”
“After admission, Hawai‘i endured in the national imagination as a modern racial paradise, justifying not only the United States’ continuing political domination but also its capitalist encroachment. The persistence of this fantasy hinged in part on regenerating the trope of the vanishing native in relation to Asian American “success.” Poststatehood accounts of Hawaiian society remarked on the “rapidly” disappearing indigenous population. As Hawai‘i’s “sophisticated civilization” displaced “old Polynesia,” so, too, were “full-blooded” Native Hawaiians destined to fade into the mixed-race population with only vestiges of their traditional culture to remain. Contemporaries juxtaposed the fate of Native Hawaiians to the rise of the “AJA”s (Americans of Japanese Ancestry). They relegated Native Hawaiians to the primitive past, whereas they hailed Japanese Americans as the symbols of the islands’ future.” 

While such ruminations were generally celebratory, competing voices could occasionally be discerned. One example was that of Reverend Abraham Akaka, who conveyed the ambivalence toward statehood expressed by many of his fellow Native Hawaiians. On the day after Congress passed the Hawai‘i statehood bill, Akaka sermonized, “There are some of us to whom statehood brings great hopes, and there are those to whom statehood brings silent fears…. There are fears that Hawaii as a state will be motivated by economic greed, that statehood will turn Hawaii … into a great big spiritual junkyard filled with smashed dreams, worn out illusions; that it will make the Hawaiian people lonely, confused, insecure, empty, anxious, restless, disillusioned—a wistful people.” Later he mused that “the Hawaiian … must chart his own steps, make his own studies, and make up his own mind” to prevent the total erasure of Native Hawaiian “identity.”85 Such protestations nonetheless remained overshadowed by the dominant discourse of Hawai‘i as a racial paradise. Notably, the first report of the US Commission on Civil Rights in 1959 rehearsed the conviction that Hawai‘i boasted a culture of tolerance and integration, rooted in “mutual respect, understanding, and widespread appreciation of the dignity and goodness of human beings