National Reports
SHUCK, L. EDWARD Jr.
National Reports Hawaii Is More Than Hula Skirts By L. Edward Shuck Jr. Honolulu Eight hours by air from San Francisco sits the Territory of Hawaii. Tourism, understandably seeking out the...
...To equate metropolitan, heavily-populated Hawaii with pioneering Alaska is to reveal one's ignorance about both territories...
...In the outback are highly mechanized pineapple and sugar plantations, resort hotels, Army reservations and a few delightful swimming beaches, rimmed by crowds of gas-buggies, not outrigger canoes...
...As Hawaii is part of America, it serves as a demonstration that American culture is sufficiently flexible, mature and sophisticated to lead the world of a hundred years from now...
...In the main, it hasn't to the degree often suggested by sentimentalists except for the potpourri or part-Hawaiians, who seem to provide the connection for most of the gene-mixing...
...Here is a microcosm of the 21st century...
...As matters stand now...
...The issue becomes "practical" instead of resting merely on logic and simple human justice...
...Islanders pay income and other Federal taxes at per-capita rates higher than the national average...
...Nevertheless, under the impact of foreigners the socially rigid, authoritarian, pre-literate and pre-scientific culture of the original inhabitants of these islands was almost completely obliterated by the last half of the last century...
...It remains unfortunate that this territory remains deprived of statehood...
...Satisfaction is provided rather by the fact that people representing the nations of Europe, Asia and the Pacific islands meet and live together as equals cooperating in the development of a society made richer and more meaningful by their mutual respect for varying traditions...
...Their counterpart, naturally, is the sun-browned, ukelele-playing beach boy, who promises all kinds of high romance for Mainland females...
...The tourist brochures, to be sure, are right in many ways...
...Early in the last century, gunpowder and iron, combined with economic convenience, brought unity and order in Hawaii...
...Asians generally and, perhaps, logically regard Hawaii somewhat as they once regarded the Philippines as a colony largely inhabited by people whom "Americans" regard as second-class human beings because the majority are of non-Caucasian origin...
...When adults go barefoot here, they do so by intelligent choice, not out of poverty or ignorance...
...It has been used against statehood applications for over a century...
...They pick breadfruit and coconuts and occasionally dreamily catch a fish or two with hand-made, coconut-fiber nets, of course in one of the charming "tropical lagoons" which surround spectacular mountains...
...One is apprehensive not of their statements but of their tremendous success...
...There are more privately-owned automobiles per capita than in any other county in the United States except Los Angeles...
...For this Hawaii is not a narrow community of Caucasian dominance, nor is it the community of yesterday in which different levels of citizenship rights were assigned according to skin pigmentation or to theological allegiance...
...But, when one takes a longer look at Hawaii's potentialities as an instrument of American policies in Asia, a new perspective opens up...
...It contains over 400,000 people and is thoroughly modernized and even industrialized...
...Its mood is courteous and friendly and probably a good deal more sincere and charitable than that of Miami or Los Angeles...
...One searches vainly for any basic logic in the most prevalent arguments against statehood: "Non-contiguity" has become meaningless since the communications revolution...
...To set the record straight, the island of Oahu, comprising Honolulu City and County, is about 40 miles long by an average 20 miles wide...
...So long as Hawaii remains a territory, it remains an example of Caucasians relegating non-Caucasians to inferior status...
...Today, the island is a distinctly new Pacific community which is both "modern Hawaiian" and, in the larger sense of political obligations and allegiance, most completely American...
...Special interests of national defense" is just an abdication of thinking...
...Bare-breasted women would receive as gruff treatment from the local police as they would in Kansas City...
...If Honolulu drivers were not exceptionally courteous, traffic conditions would be dangerous...
...For too long now, there has apparently been a willingness to ignore the fact that the only seemingly rock-founded reason for continued denial of statehood for Hawaii is racial prejudice...
...In no other sizable spot in the world do so many races and variously cultivated individuals live together in such a high degree of creative harmony...
...Statehood pleas by Hawaii are so old and continuous that they are doubtless boring to other Americans who enjoy the full rights of citizenship...
...But the value of the Territory which is about the size of Connecticut and has a total population of nearly 520,000 lies well beyond the fanciful and frivolous...
...Interspersed with the easy wooing, the rustling of hula skirts (made in Tokyo or Manila), and the plunking of these simplified Portuguese mandolins is the human backdrop of happy, childlike "natives," who maintain "old Hawaii" or, as tourism likes to render it, Havah'hi...
...The people like baseball, football, track, and Sunday afternoon drives...
...This territory possesses, for example, the climate which Florida boasts about...
...By 1850, the pre-white, stone-age culture of the Polynesians here had been substantially canceled out...
...They are pleasant and contribute to local pride as does scrapple in Pennsylvania, joy-riding in side-wheelers out of St...
...Eighty-five per cent of them, moreover, are native-born Americans...
...The aloha spirit exists and is authentic...
...Most of the population has been literate for well over a century...
...Here have been brought the cultural peculiarities of all the continents...
...Over 80 per cent of those eligible voted in the last election a figure well above the national average and especially surprising because Islanders cannot vote for a President or Governor...
...The Caucasian proportion, not incidentally, is very nearly the same as in the world as a whole...
...These conglomerate origins have simultaneously created a new world culture and a distinctly American culture...
...Louis or Louisville, or cowboy boots in Dallas...
...Springfield, Sacramento and elsewhere...
...Hawaii's ruling elite is composed of persons of Caucasian, Japanese, Chinese and part-Hawaiian ancestry...
...Tourism, understandably seeking out the traveler's coin, has sold Hawaii as a palm-draped bower for dark-skinned, barefoot houris, who, stimulated by uninhibited urges of hospitality, await the Mainland male...
...The beauty of the situation, sociologically speaking, is not that miscegenation has taken place with abandon...
...English is the language of the home, except for a handful of oldsters who prefer the rhythm of old-country tongues, just as do many old folks in New York, Jersey City and Chicago...
...Thus, a realistic picture of Hawaii and the positive pattern it suggests for American foreign policies in Asia are obscured by a cloud of pleasant nonsense...
...It is as amusing as it is irrelevant to those who have made any study at all of the frequent antics of legislatures in Albany...
...Political immaturity" is the time-worn cliche offered by Republicans when Democrats control the Territorial Legislature and by Democrats when the Republicans control it...
...Indeed, accepting Hawaii as a full member of the union might well be the answer to our desperate search for some key of influence in Asia...
...Everybody speaks English...
...Alert intellectually, it supports one of the best school systems in the United States, including the 6,000-student University of Hawaii, staffed by a highly qualified faculty of 300...
...Some inconsequentials, like a few exotic words to enrich the colloquial language and the efforts to establish a largely ersatz "Hawaiian" music and dance, have been revived by general acclaim during the present century...
...The happy locals allegedly live without spinning and weaving anything, that is, but hips and eyes...
...We cannot keep flagellating ourselves about this national character flaw, the evil effects of which are so rapidly being ameliorated...
...The charming, easy-going device of transitional control, the Hawaiian monarchy as set up by Caucasian advisers, did not obscure the fact that a new cultural synthesis was in the process of creation...
...Whether the justly famed "aloha spirit" comes from the 18th-century feuding Polynesians, or from the heavy population of Orientals whose grandparents learned their manners in Japan, China and the Philippines, is debatable...
...Nevertheless, the dimensions of the error we are making with regard to Hawaiian statehood should be more carefully thought through...
Vol. 39 • June 1956 • No. 23
