Hoomalimali Party

(See front cover)

There are only two directions in Hawaii--makai, toward the sea, and mauka, toward the mountains. Last week all Hawaiians were looking makai. Somewhere below the horizon a sleek grey cruiser was slicing its way westward through the long swells of the Pacific. Aboard was the most distinguished visitor to the islands since Explorer-Captain James Cook first stepped ashore 156 years ago.

To receive the first U. S. President in its territorial history the "Paradise of the Pacific" was prepared to give Franklin Roosevelt a royal welcome. Its citizens were planning to put him up at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, in the suite occupied three years ago by Siam's good King Prajadhipok and Queen Rambai Barni. There from his lanai (veranda) he could look out at the surfboarders and swimmers of Waikiki Beach. A hundred volunteer guides were eager to show him the huge fortifications on Diamond Head, the great naval base in land-locked Pearl Harbor (which he as Assistant Secretary of the Navy helped develop), a review of troops at the largest U. S. Army post (Schofield Barracks: 30,000 men). For the asking they would gladly take him fishing for the great a'u (swordfish) in Kona waters, drive him through Hawaii's fern forests, show him sugar-cane fields, pineapple plantations, the leper colony, crown him with leis, feed him poi (taro root paste), or entertain him at a native feast (luau) with straw-skirt ballet.

Races. But aside from the happy excitement of playing host to such a notable stranger for a few days Hawaiians had another, deeper reason for being interested in the President's coming. Last year he had tried to take away the territory's cherished right to home-rule, to appoint a mainlander as its Governor. His ostensible reason was that it was hard to find, as the law required, a good man resident on the islands. But all the world knew that the President was thinking of the Massie rape & murder case of 1931-32, of the racial seethings that followed, of the loud squawks of an outraged Navy (TIME, Dec. 28, 1931, et seq.). By refusal of the Senate to act the President was prevented from carrying out what every resident of the territory would have considered a gross injustice based on a false premise.

Far from being troubled by race problems, Hawaiians are proud of their islands as a place where 146,000 Japanese, 66,000 Filipinos. 27,000 Chinese, 22,000 Polynesians, 29,000 Portuguese, 7,000 Puerto Ricans, 45,000 whites and 31,000 mixed breeds all live happily together, intermarry and get along more peaceably than any other similar mixture in the world.

Balked by Congress in his effort to name a mainland Democrat to a $10,000-a-year job, the President was in no hurry to appoint a new Governor. Not until he had been in office nearly a year did he finally pick a successor to Lawrence McCully Judd, descendant of a Yankee medical missionary who went to the Sandwich Islands a century ago. Then he appointed the next best thing to the kind of man he originally wanted--a Democrat who had lived on the islands only 17 years.

Governor. Joseph Boyd Poindexter is the son of a California pioneer who became a rancher in Montana during the '80s. Son Joseph grew up, took to the law, went into politics, became a State judge. He was Montana's Attorney General in 1917 when Woodrow Wilson made him a Federal judge in Hawaii. He was a quiet man, some said stubborn, firm and courteous on the bench, not given to expansive talk or large social entertainments. Hunting, fishing and contract bridge were his only sports and his only boast concerned fishing: "The big ones never get away from me."

The job of Governor of Hawaii was one of the big ones that did not get away from him. Yet he made no elaborate expedition for it. After he retired from the bench in 1924, he practiced law in Honolulu, became president of the Hawaii Bar Association, something of an island civitarian. Neither the powerful Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association nor the local Democratic machine sponsored him for Governor. Coolidge-like in disposition, and having little in common with Franklin Roosevelt save religion (Episcopalian) and one personal habit (incessant cigaret smoking), "Judge" Poindexter won the President's approval because all groups admitted he was a good man, although not their man.

Years ago John Dominis, a shipmaster who made a fortune in the Pacific trade, built himself a fine white colonial mansion in what is now the centre of Honolulu. His half-white son married Liliuokalani, last Hawaiian monarch. John Dominis' house became Iolani Palace and his daughter-in-law lived in it long after she was deposed. When she died, a great fat wahine, in 1917, the territorial Government bought Iolani Palace as a Governor's mansion. It still stands, enlarged but little changed. There on March 1, "Judge" Poindexter was sworn in as Governor by his friend Justice Banks of the Hawaiian Supreme Court. There, with his daughter Helen, Governor Poindexter stood in Queen Lil's throne-room giving formal reception to all and sundry who tramped past the statue of King Kamehamcha I, across the landscaped grounds, and through the Governor's door.

Those who looked for a New Deal Governor to begin with a flourish were disappointed. He did not even deliver an inaugural address. During his first nine days in office, he allowed many people to come and whisper in his ear, including Democratic National Committeeman John H. Wilson ( 3/8 Scotch-Irish, 1/4 Tahitian, 1/8 Hawaiian), but no political appointment was made, not one single official statement issued.

Masters & Men. Thus after monarchs, missionaries and merchants came a Montanan to join the company of rulers who have governed the Sandwich Islanders. In 1820 in the days of the sandalwood trade, when missionaries began to arrive by shiploads, the islands were ruled by the native dynasty founded by the great Kamehameha. The missionaries undertook more than the care of Polynesian souls. They became advisers and ministers to the native monarchs. Their lay offspring became merchants and, with Yankee traders who settled there, took the islands' economic upbringing firmly in hand. Thus sprang up a benevolent white aristocracy which developed the islands and dominates them socially and economically to this day.

In 1893 when the monarchy passed away a white aristocrat named Sanford Ballard Dole became President of the Hawaiian Republic. In 1900, when the Republic became a U. S. Territory, he was named its first Governor and the same families, the Castles, the Cookes, the Binghams, the Dillinghams, the Judds, continued to rule. Like southern planters before the Civil War they built up a comfortable society based economically on agriculture. Like the South, also, the mudsill of their society was cheap labor. First they imported Chinese and Portuguese, then Japanese, and, when the "gentlemen's agreement" with Japan was made, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. These peoples arrived by the shipload, were quartered in agricultural camps, given free housing, free water, free wood, free medical service. In spite of small wages it was a beneficent system--too beneficent, as it turned out. The Chinese coolie who contentedly grew rice in the river bottoms, and the Filipino who irrigated the sugar-cane fields, had children who were U. S. citizens. The second and third generation of field workers, after much free schooling, refused to live and do as their forebears. So the importation of labor went on and Depression caught the islands with a far larger white-collar population than an agricultural land can easily support.

The biggest fish in Hawaii's economic pool are her five big companies of "factors"--American Factors, C. Brewer & Co. ("oldest American corporation west of the Rockies"), Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin, Theodore Davies & Co. These firms, controlled by old missionary-merchant families and interlocked by marriage, own or act as agents for most of Hawaii's sugar plantations. At the turn of the century James D. Dole, no islander but a second cousin of Patriarch Sanford, came out from Boston, and started the pineapple business which made him many a million. After suffering huge losses in 1931 and 1932, his Hawaiian Pineapple Co. was reorganized, and Castle & Cooke took a hand in its management.

Sugar. Since Hawaii's chief industry is agriculture, since her No. 1 agriculture product is sugar and her No. 2 product is pineapples, since her chief manufacturing industries are processing sugar and canning pineapples, there is no doubt about who rules the territory, regardless of who happens to be holding forth in Iolani Palace. Most of these economic rulers, traditionally Republican, view the New Deal of their distinguished Democratic visitor with considerable apprehension, if not downright alarm.

Last spring when the Costigan-Jones sugar restriction bill was under consideration, they were disappointed when President Roosevelt proposed a Hawaiian sugar quota of only 935,000 tons whereas the average annual production on the island for the last three years has been about 1,000,000 tons. They were still more chagrined when Congress, after upping the quota of mainland beet-sugar producers 100,000 tons above the President's request, left the quota for Hawaii to be fixed by Undersecretary of Agriculture Tugwell. In proportioning quotas between Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the Philippines, Brain Truster Tugwell used the average crops of 1931-32-33 as figures for the other islands, but based Hawaii's quota on the years 1930-31-32, to Hawaii's disadvantage. Result: Hawaii's quota was set at 917,000 tons instead of at least 975,000 which she felt was her due. The reason for this discrimination, many Hawaiians said privately, was Dr. Tugwell's disapproval of the Hawaiian industry's control by a few rich families.

Tourism. But for one business favor every Hawaiian last week thanked the New Deal which supplied a traveling President to publicize the territory as a land for tourists. In 1929 nearly 22,000 people sailed four days and a half across 2,000 miles of Pacific Ocean to see Hawaii's famed hedges of night-blooming cereus, to lie lazily on its beaches, explore its volcanoes, taste its papaias and mangos, smell its fragrant pikake blossoms, listen to its ukuleles. For these and like blessings they left $11,000,000 behind, a sort of thank-offering which the Hawaiians gratefully received.

Eager to be thanked again on the 1929 scale, Hawaii made much of the delights to be offered to President Roosevelt and to any one else with $150 for round-trip steamship fare. One theme on which territorial boosters harped heavily: Hawaii is an integral part of the U. S.

Every white, brown or yellow resident who hopes the New Deal will deal the islands four aces instead of a bobtail flush repeats those words. Hawaii is not a possession of the U. S., like Puerto Rico or the Philippines, but a territory like Alaska. Unlike Puerto Rico, which keeps all for itself, it pays into the Federal treasury income taxes, internal revenue taxes, customs' duties, has sent an average of $5,000,000 a year to Washington for each of the last 34 years. Its tax contribution is bigger than that of any one of 17 full-fledged states. Geography can be argued against Statehood for Hawaii but not governmental finances.

The Hawaiians have a word meaning to humor or jolly for a purpose. It is hoomalimali. Last week President Roosevelt, who can hoomalimali better than most men, was coming to apply his art to their injured feelings. And for him his hosts had prepared the biggest hoomalimali party on record to get Hawaii out of the stepchild class.

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