IS THE U. S. A. A CLOSED CORPORATION?
JAMES, DANIEL
Is the U. S. A. a Closed poration? By Daniel James r~M^ HERE IS epic tragedy in the specI tacle of a powerful United States Congress rejecting, on no less than sixteen occasions within...
...Thus, it has been said, 'The territorial state is one of pupilage at best.' Nelson v. United Slates (30 Fed...
...Reduction of territorial residents to secondclass citizenship, and "taxation without representation" of these individuals, are two further classic characteristics c/f imperialist control...
...Terms precisely like these have been writttn into the organic acts which have since governed all our territories...
...Yet Hawaii has been serving probation as a territory for nearly half a century, and Alaska for three and a half decades, while Puerto Rico has not even been advanced from the status of an "unorganized territory" (established in 1917) to that of an incorporated one...
...The sad but inescapable conclusion is that false accusations of disloyalty in the past have been used to disguise the real reason for Congressional opposition to Hawaiian claims from the outset—Hawaii's mixed racial composition...
...There are those in Washington who shudder at the prospect of sitting next to pig...
...Arizona and New Mexico, because they contained populations "largely of Mexican blood...
...America's greatness has lain in its ability to adhere strictly to this non-imperialist course, to expand its democracy with a minimum of coercion, and to absorb new people of many origins...
...By Daniel James r~M^ HERE IS epic tragedy in the specI tacle of a powerful United States Congress rejecting, on no less than sixteen occasions within forty-five years, the petitions for statehood of so proud and independent a people as the Hswaiians...
...What Congress is evidently too inhibited to utter aloud was stated frankly by the late Dr...
...to provide . . . for the establishment of States, and permanent governments therein, and for their admission to a share in the federal councils on an equal footing with the original states, at as early periods as may be consistent with the general interest...
...This Ordinance specifically empowered Congress...
...ACCORDING TO THE Northwest Ordinance "whenever any of the said States (meaning territories) shall have sixty thousand free inhabitants therein, such State shall be admitted . . . into the Congress of the United States...
...ACCORDING TO ARTICLE IV of the Constitution, "New States may be admitted by Congress into the Union...
...Rhode Island was the smallest territory to achieve state rank, with only 1,214 square miles of land within its borders...
...Finally, failure tc implement promises made in the several organic acts, which declare unequivocally that the territories are eventually to be granted statehood, will round out our role as a perfidious Albion...
...All other territories admitted into the Union, it is argued,, were part of the continent...
...Alaska and Puerto Fiico, if they should happen to be elected by popular choice, can enrich it with their varied backgrounds and experiences...
...Army liquidation of Hawaiian civil government in 1942, and its replacement by a military regime, conclusively demonstrated that in a showdown we shall not hesitate to scuttle territorial democracy...
...The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and mpke all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the territory or other Property belonging to the United States...
...But as a resident of San Juan or Honolulu, this same individual suddenly becomes a second-class citizen and may not vote at all, for he is then considered a menace to Caucasian purity...
...Since 1796 thirty states, a majority, have undeviatingly followed the path from "pupilage" to full statehood...
...Far from "contaminating" our national legislature, representatives of different racial strains from Hawaii...
...A territory, under the Constitution and laws of the United States in an inchoate state.' Ex parte Morgan (20 Fed...
...Thus, Alabama entered the Union after only two years of territorial apprenticeship, while New Mexico holds the record for time spent in "pupilage" — sixty-one years...
...A second subsidiary objection to granting statehood to our territories, expressed by Dr...
...The de facto closing of our Union to new membership can only spell permanent colonial status for our territories, and the insidious embrace of imperialism by the American mainland...
...and from 1836 to 1912, we acquired an average of one infant state every two or three years...
...yjjtk what certainly must be different inteft" ests from ours and very different back-, grounds, might very easily mark the beginning of the end...
...Aside of the high democratic principles involved, our position toward our T _--> Daniel James, managing editor of The New Lender, spent pari of his Army career in Hawaii as an Information-Education officer...
...Since the non-white people of Hawaii are not likely to fall into the minority in the foreseeable future, does Congress intend to condemn it to territorial inferiority forever...
...Practice and custom have put these constitutional, legislative and judicial arguments beyond question...
...to quote Lord Bryce, were therefore believed "not fit for . . . emancipation from the tutelage of Congress" until 1912...
...Obviously, Alaska with a population of 72,524, Hawaii with 502,000, and Puerto Rico with 1.839,255, cannot be denied higher status because they lack a sufficient number of "free inhabitants...
...I d§- ' ctded that statehood was not a possibility...
...Hawaii, or Puerto Rico or any other outlying territory be admitted as a Sttte into our Federal Union...
...Even Puerto Rico, so frequently labeled as "backward," is in most respects better fitted to assume the responsibilities of statehood (or independence) than were many cf cur primitive western communities which became states during the last century...
...The 81st Congress owes the American people an historical obligation re-open once again the fiontiers of the United States...
...and in Utah's case, religious tolerance finally caught up with us...
...Luckily for white supremacy, by 1912 the "pure whites" in the latter two states outnumbered the Hispanos...
...A former Governor of Puerto Rico, the late Colonel Theodore Roosevelt,' expressed the underlying lily-white atU titude of many in Congress when he wrote: "Would 11 (the United States) haf willing to place two Puerto Ricaa senators in the Senate end the corresponding congressmen In the lowaf^ house...
...Nicholas Murray Butler, who last year told tha House Committee on Territories at a hearing on Hawaii: "Under no circumstances shouldt Alaska...
...Watching the European nations carve their' empires out of this continent, fair forefathers framed the Northwest Ordinance in a deliberate effort to prevent us from pursuing similar adventures, for the Ordinance directed Congress to encourage self-government in cur crudest frontier communities rather than convert them into colonies...
...If, in the earlier Congress, whose members were elected during the war, there lingered suspicions concerning the loyalty of the islands' Japanesedescended population — despite ample wartime proof of their supreme patriotism—in the 80th -Congress no trace of this seemed to exist...
...Have we permanently closed our books to new membership in the United States of America, Inc...
...Despite this proviso, Nevada was admitted when she possessed a mere 20,000 individuals, one-third of the stipulated number...
...We will permit a citizen of any racial origin ¦whatsoever to vote for, or even run for the office of President, or any other office he so chooses, whether he be a Puerto Rican living in New York or an Oriental in San Francisco...
...Fewer demonstrations would arouse for us more respect among these peoples than the elevation of Hawaii and Alaska to a plane of equality with the forty-eight states, and the initiation of a policy which would enable Puerto Rico to choose freely between statehood and independence...
...If Puerto Rico's case is somewhat weakened because as an "unorganized" territory it is still a notch below an incorporated one, there is not the slightest justification for denying statehood to Hawaiii, after fortyeight years of self-government under the American flag, or to Alaska, after thirty-six...
...UNFORTUNATELY, this is not the first time that racial or religious factors have motivated Congress' attitude toward territories applying for statehood...
...Do tbey fail to meet the standards of eligibility set up for new states...
...516): "The impermanent character of these (territorial) governments has often been noted...
...In fact, so anxious once were we to expand the Union that, from 1816 to 1821, inclusive, we admitted a new state every single year...
...What about size: The Northwest Ordinance is silent on this point...
...To add outlying territory hundreds of thousands of miles away (sic...
...The thirty-six-year hiatus since, during which no new states have been created, is twice as long as the longest previous lapse between admissions of states in our entire history...
...Nothing has since happened to indicate that our legislators have excluded racial considerations from their judgment of Hawaii...
...298, 305...
...A glance into any history book would further reveal that, at a time when distance "mattered, but expanding democracy mattered more, we invited every French and English possession in North America—insular as well as continental—to join our Union...
...men ted legislators from these three areas...
...This double standard applies also to Hawaiians and Alaskans...
...Under this authority Congress, in 1787, made certain "needful Rules and Regulations" known collectively as the Northwest Ordinance...
...The last of our forty-eight states, Arizona and New Mexico, were admitted into the Union in 1912...
...This fear is thrice-compounded in Congressional minds when it is remembered that opening the gates to Hawaii must sooner or later lead to acceptance of Alaska, which has a bare Caucasian majority, and of Puerto Rico, which is overwhelmingly non-white...
...Later, President Polk tried to buy Cuba, and Grant the Republic of San Domingo, both with the intention of turning them into states...
...Fundamentally, as Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug has remarked, "There is no room in our scheme of ^ government for holding an incorporated territory in a perpetual state of 'tutelage...
...If such, then, has been our policy in theory and fact for a century and a half, what can possibly justify our current treatment of Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico...
...In other words, from 1787 on we have organized territories for the primary purpose of eventually granting them statehood...
...What historical justification can there be for such a policy...
...At the turn of the century, the United States Supreme Court clarified the status of territories in even greater detail, in the case of O'Donoghue v. United States (289 U.S...
...After .balancing (this and other questions) in my mind...
...112, 115...
...Utah was forced to wait two generations before attaining statehood, although more backward regions were meanwhile being admitted into the Union, solely because of its Mormon majority...
...Nor is this tragedy confined to Hawaii alone...
...Exclusiveness can only breed insularity and arrogance...
...territories is especially hypocritical when, as Colonel Roosevelt further pointed out, "(The Puerto Rican) cannot vote for President, of course, if he lives in Puerto Rico, but if he goes to the United States, he enters as a citizen and . . . can vote for President or exercise any other privilege of American citizenship...
...Alaska arid Puerto Rico were precisely what made them invaluable to us, certainly in peacetime they can prove to be equally important as bridges of understanding between ourselves and the peoples of Asia and Latin America whose kin populate them...
...while Puerto Rico will be left to flounder indefinitely between equally abortive dreams of statehoed and independence...
...Butler and endorsed by neo-isolationists, is that they are geographically not contiguous to the mainland...
...It is almost embarrassing to have to point out that modern means of communication have brought Hawaii, 2,500 miles from the West Coast, closer to the national capital than was Boston in 1776—one had assumed that the shrinkage of the world was taken for granted nowadays...
...NO SANE CONGRESSMAN doubts for an instant that Hawaii, in particular, has long deserved statehood status., This leaves mysteriously unexplained the failure of both the 79th and 80th Congresses to act on legislation to admit Hawaii...
...Events have already shown imperialism to be more than implicit in an exclusionist policy...
...FROM A PURELY practical ftandpoint, if in wartime the geographical— i.e., the strategic—locations of Hawaii...
...Volume upon volume of testimony taken by Congressional committees throughout the years—perennial legislative junkets to Hawaii have become almost a ritual—prove beyond a doubt that Hawaii is qualified for statehood on all ?ther grounds: taxes paid annually into the Federal Treasury, natural and industrial resources, labor and welfare legislation, health and education standards, democratic tradition, and so on Alaska rates a good second despite her semi-frontier character...
...So long as the Pacific outpost remains a territory, Alaska cannot hope to emerge from its territorial status (unless Congress wishes to by-pass Hawaii and thus brave a tidal wave of protest...
...No maximum term of probation was ever prescribed for a territory...
...The question inevitably arises: Why have we consistently refused to make Hawaii our forty-ninth state...
...and within the next decade or two, it is predicted, she will experience new industrial and cultural advances...
...On the other hand, Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico each contain not less than twice the area of contemporary Rhode Island and Delaware combined...
...Fear of the "Japanese" has meant, all along, fear of the non-white Hawaiian majority...
...Persistent exclusion of these areas from the American Union makes one wonder whether we are not pursuing a "closed corporation" policy which, in effect, resembles that of an imperialist mother eountry toward its colonies...
Vol. 32 • June 1949 • No. 25
