CHAPTER I - ALOHA FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART
In the early summer of 1934, the citizens of Hawaii, whom no incumbent president had ever bothered to visit, were looking forward to the arrival of Franklin Roosevelt,. just then at the peak of his popularity because of his efforts to fight the Great Depression. The chief executive would be ‘coming down,' as the islanders phrased it, in the heavy cruiser Houston, escorted by a second cruiser of the same class, the idea being that the escort would plow ahead to smooth out any unpresidential waves, leaving FDR's party, which included two of his sons, to ride comfortably in its wake. As a sailing and naval enthusiast, FDR seldom missed a chance to travel with the fleet. He used to hitch rides regularly along the East Coast to his summer place at Campobello when he was Woodrow Wilson's assistant secretary of the navy. Of course, tieing up two cruisers played hob with training schedules, but the admirals could console themselves with the thought that FDR wasn't merely president, not merely commander-in-chief, but a long time friend of the Navy. Sure enough, one fine day in July, watchers on the Kona coast of the Big Island were rewarded by the sight of two huge warships riding in the swells offshore, while Hawaiian ‘sampans' scouted for game fish for the chief. Presently, a launch was lowered from which someone appeared to be fishing.FDR had never been to Hawaii, and a decade was to pass before he came again, in the midst of the war, when he was diminished in health and vigor. But nothing in the intervening years was to change his mind much about Hawaii or, for that matter, the Philippine colony, China, Japan, and the rest of the turbulent Pacific world.
America's first concern in 1934 was the Depression. FDR had literally exhausted himself during his first year pushing recovery measures. No one begrudged him a seagoing junket, sprinkled with ceremonial Good Neighbor visits to Caribbean ports and a transit of the Panama Canal, before launching into the broad Pacific. A little fishing along the way.
If FDR hadn't visited Hawaii previously, it was no fault of his. Back in Wilson's time he had finagled a trip to dedicate a new dry-dock at Pearl Harbor, only to have his boss Josephus Daniels pull rank on him. They made a little joke of it.(1)
The newspapers speculated that perhaps the president was meeting with some Japanese leader at sea, but the State Department denied it. Actually, a meeting in Hawaii between FDR and the Japanese premier had been mooted in Washington and Tokyo, and FDR had encouraged it. The project cooled off, possibly because Japanese Foreign Minister Amau was reported as issuing a warning to western powers to cease giving assistance to China. So, FDR had no pressing official reason for the trip to Hawaii, although he was not without interest in the area and its problems.
Within the Washington bureaucracy Harold Ickes' Interior Department Office of Territories had responsibility for Hawaiian affairs, and so it fell to Interior to inquire of Hawaii's newly appointed governor about sport fishing in the waters around the Islands. In fact, the arrangements for the president's visit turned out to be one of the first big problems the new governor tackled. Joseph B. Poindexter was not himself an islander, but a deserving Democrat originally from Montana, appointed to the bench by Woodrow Wilson. A mild widower with a bad habit of dawdling, he would eventually earn the nickname "Mahope Joe," or Joe Tomorrow. He entered on stage as something of a political accident, and ultimately suffered the embarrassment of having his boss Harold Ickes' opinion of him spread on the public record in the Pearl Harbor hearings. "Never been anything to cheer about."{2}
Poindexter broke a long line of Republican governors in Iolani Palace, the old residence of the Hawaiian monarchs, but he still faced Republican majorities in the territorial legislature. Hawaii had been traditionally ruled by the Republicans, and lately by the Big Five, the sugar and pineapple oligarchs, who were the political heirs of the men who overthrew the Hawaiian kingdom. The Big Five got along fine with the Army's Hawaiian Department which was charged with the internal security of the Islands, but less so with the naval command. These magnates were aware that their régime was threatened from two directions. Some Army and Navy officers wanted to establish a commission to govern the Islands, which were after all the key position in the Pacific. A model for this commission existed in American Samoa which the Navy had been administering since 1900. In addition, Section 67 of the Hawaiian Organic Act empowered the governor to proclaim martial law at the mere threat of an invasion, and all the war plans contemplated that the Army would take over when the balloon went up. But many officers hoped that something might be done sooner.
The other threat to the régime lay in the demographics. Anglo-Saxon whites were in a minority. Sooner or later, native born citizens of Asian descent, of whom the Japanese were the most numerous, would assert themselves at the polls and succeed to power. There were many politicians on the mainland who worried that racial aspirations in Hawaii would encourage agitation in their backyards. These interests had set their minds against statehood for Hawaii and favored some form of military control, ostensibly to counter the threat posed by the ethnic Japanese.(3)
For example, Chicago newspaper publisher Frank Knox had only recently--in January 1933--complained about the dire conditions in Hawaii in a letter to Hugh Drum, Army vice chief of staff: "I have just returned from Honolulu where I was tremendously impressed and alarmed at the threat to our security there due to the swift growth and power of Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino citizens who dictate to the political government and imperil the safety of our army garrison and our naval base in case of trouble with Japan. The Hawaiian Islands should at once be put under the rule of a commission composed of one representative from the army, one of the navy and one civilian, and no time should be lost in doing this. The first military precaution to be taken in Hawaii is to intern every Japanese resident before the beginning of hostilities threatens. To wait until hostilities begin would be too late."(4)
Extreme, even faintly bloodthirsty, Colonel Knox might sound. His views, nevertheless, were not unusual in the early thirties. Knox had been one of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders and counted himself as a liberal Republican. He went on to be Alf Landon's running mate in the 1936 election, FDR's navy secretary, and was the first Washington official to arrive in Hawaii to investigate the Pearl Harbor disaster.
Upsetting the old Rough Rider was the most important event in Hawaii since its annexation in 1898. Something that started out innocently on a Saturday night in September 1931, when a number of submarine officers took their wives out for an evening at the Ala Wai Inn in Honolulu, a club that furnished dinner, dance music, and setups, Prohibition being still in force. Thalia Massie left her party at the club and was later found, bruised and beaten, wandering along the Ala Moana road along the beach. She said that she had been kidnaped and assaulted by five "Hawaiian boys," but sloppy police work cast doubt on her claim of being raped, and her identification of the suspects. At the subsequent trial the jury deadlocked.
Hawaii's ethnic groups had traditionally got along well together, to the point that the territory boasted about its "racial aloha." What racial tensions existed were mainly between the islanders and the service personnel who rotated through, most of whom had never seen a predominantly nonwhite community.(5)
Yates Stirling, the admiral commanding the 14th Naval District at Pearl Harbor, was outraged by the assault on Mrs. Massie. Stirling, who had grown up on Maryland's Eastern Shore, explained in a book he wrote that he regarded the inhabitants of Hawaii as mostly the "coolie castes," the off-scourings of the Orient. Officers began to worry about the safety of their wives, and lynch fever spread among the enlisted men. Sailors kidnaped and beat one of the suspects in the Massie case a few days after his release from jail. And then, Lieutenant Thomas Massie, along with Grace Fortescue--his formidable mother-in-law-- and two sailors, kidnaped and murdered Joseph Kahawahai, another of the defendants. They were apprehended with the corpse after a classic car chase, apparently intending to dump the body into Oahu's Blow Hole to destroy the evidence.
The ensuing Massie trial served up sensational court drama, while white supremacists enjoyed a field day, whooped on by the Navy, even by the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral William Pratt, who lobbied for a change of venue to Hilo, on the Big Island, thinking he could send fleet units there. Bills in Congress proposed repealing Hawaii's territorial status and establishing a military commission. Magazines and newspapers on the mainland gave the trial great play. A grand jury at first refused even to indict Massie and his associates, and out to defend them came Clarence Darrow, the most famous criminal lawyer in the country. Darrow replayed for the jury the sufferings of the Massies. The jury, however, returned a verdict of manslaughter which carried a mandatory ten-year sentence. By now, the Hawaiian community leaders had come to the conclusion that their ascendancy was threatened by popular indignation at the treatment of Hawaiian citizens on the one hand, and by the clamor for some sort of military control. Socialite Grace Fortescue serving time for the murder of a ‘native' seemed downright un-American. A hundred congressmen signed a petition for pardon and finally President Hoover was reported to have used the new long-distance phone to instruct the governor to commute the sentence. After an hour in the sheriff's custody, the quartet walked free. Thalia Massie left Hawaii. Eighteen months later she took Tommy Massie to Reno and divorced him. Thirty years later she died of an overdose of barbiturates.
Admiral Stirling never let the matter rest. He set up a briefing for visiting notables where he argued the case for a commission. Frank Knox had heard it.(6)
On January 9th, 1933, not long before Stirling talked with Frank Knox, Franklin Roosevelt was giving lunch to Henry Stimson, Hoover's outgoing secretary of state, who had come up from Washington for the funeral of Calvin Coolidge. Stimson was hoping the president-elect would continue the policy of non-recognition of Japanese gains in Manchuria, and keep some fleet units in the Pacific to signal American displeasure with Japan. It would have seemed logical that they might've discussed the internal situation in Hawaii, but if they did Stimson's detailed diary entry made no mention of it. The furor over the Massie case had died down and the country was fully absorbed in the frightening bank crash.
Among the thousands of distressed Americans hoping for a job under the incoming Democrats was a distinguished legal scholar, Judge Ben B. Lindsey, who had pioneered the idea of juvenile courts and then shocked everybody by advocating trial marriage. Lindsey had been living hand-to-mouth in Los Angeles and showed up in New York to do various jobs for FDR during the transition. He became the favorite to succeed Republican Lawrence Judd as Governor of Hawaii. That he was a candidate at all, he owed to a factional fight among the Hawaii Democrats. The party had never been very powerful, possibly because they never had much patronage. Woodrow Wilson hadn't been able to make sense out of their squabbles and had actually appointed as governor a man who was only nominally a Democrat. In 1933, the white or haole wing of the party was supporting a well-digging contractor who had been elected the delegate to Congress. The other wing put forward John Wilson, the part-Hawaiian former mayor of Honolulu. But Wilson was said to be friendly with ethnic Japanese circles and this was enough to scare off FDR's patronage dispensers. FDR settled on Lindsey. Clarence Darrow had deliberately played down the racial issue during the Massie trial and Lindsey had sought him out after his return from Honolulu. Lindsey envisioned making Hawaii a laboratory for a radically progressive legal system. Whatever that meant, he never said. Nor did he reveal what, if anything, FDR had in mind.
But there was a problem with Lindsey. He wasn't a resident of Hawaii and FDR had to send a "must" bill to Congress to suspend the requirement. It was introduced by John Rankin, an ardent segregationist, and encountered opposition from Hawaiians of all stripes after its sponsors stressed that it would provide a governor susceptible to military influence. Arthur Vandenberg, senator from Michigan, killed it by threatening a filibuster. This sent Harold Ickes back to his lists of candidates and his woeful mien when he arrived with them at the White House became an insider joke. At one point presidential adviser Louis Howe concocted a plot, code named PINEAPPLE, to get disgruntled brain-truster Raymond Moley out of Washington by sending him to investigate the situation in Honolulu. There was even a delegation from the Islands in town to see if FDR, like Woodrow Wilson, could be gulled into appointing a Republican.
The starving Democrats in Hawaii continued to starve until January 1934 when FDR sent Poindexter's name up to the Hill. Whatever his views on other subjects, his distrust of his Japanese constituents probably did him no harm at the White House. As late as 1938, he was warning that their "Americanization would take another fifty years." And in 1941, his message to the legislature called for the rooting out of fifth columnists.(7)
FDR's first landfall in 1934 was the Kona coast of the Big Island, an area that professionally interested both the commander-in-chief and his naval officers. Some strategists were to fear that the Japanese Navy could land there, welcomed by a host of kinsmen and sympathizers and outflank Oahu and Pearl Harbor. Others held that the Big Island was too far from Oahu for such a maneuver to be successful. The official log of the cruise noted the crowds of Japanese who greeted FDR when he went ashore at Hilo.
In Honolulu, the president stayed at the Royal Hawaiian on Waikiki, went to a luau, and visited defense facilities while his sons were taught to surf by the Olympic swimmer Duke Kahanamoku. He spent an hour in a private talk with Harvard classmate Walter Dillingham, a magnate and a force in territorial affairs. Honolulu put on a big lantern parade for the president. According to the newspapers, ten thousand marched and one hundred thousand watched as all the races of Hawaii streamed by: Hawaiians with torches; Koreans; Filipinos; a Chinese float with a giant carp emitting balloons; three hundred Japanese dancing girls; a float with a Japanese fisherman making a catch from a sampan. The secret servicemen forbade the traditional Chinese firecrackers.{8}The president's speech from the balcony of Iolani Palace made it appear that the relative prosperity of Hawaii had surprised him. Kenneth Ringle, a naval intelligence officer on the way to becoming an expert on the Japanese Americans, commented that FDR was typical of men who had supported Oriental Exclusion in their youth. They never got away from the stereotype of the Oriental coolie. FDR put it this way to the Hawaiians: "May I compliment you also on the excellent appearance, neatness, and cleanliness in the homes I have seen..."(9)
Finally, he wished the territory "Aloha, from the bottom of my heart."
The service chiefs, Admiral Harry Yarnell, and General Briant Wells, had of course laid out their problems for the commander-in-chief. Wells had headed the Hawaiian Department during the Massie unpleasantness, during which he managed to keep a low profile. He brought up the matter of weighing the loyalty of the Japanese population. Wells felt this wasn't proper Army business. Instead, the FBI should be brought in. Reopen its Honolulu office. FDR seems to have concurred, but the Honolulu office didn't reopen until 1939. While chatting in the lobby of the hotel, the president asked Yarnell and Wells to remind him of something when he got back to Washington. He was thinking of the sampans, one of which had been depicted in the lantern parade, and many of which had scouted for schools of fish for his pleasure. A whole fleet of sampans operated out of Honolulu's Kewalo Basin, more than four hundred of them, large and small, many owned by Hawaiian Japanese. They had been bringing in fish since the days of the Hawaiian kingdom. Instead of figuring out some way of using them as naval auxiliaries, as most navies did, the 14th Naval District wanted to register them and limit their owners to American citizens. Such regulations stood little chance in the territorial legislature, but FDR thought something might be done by the Commerce Department in Washington, without having to go to Congress for authority. He was also thinking about the fishing boats that operated off the Pacific Coast, many owned by non-citizen Japanese, which the Navy thought were a danger to its bases and even the Panama Canal. There had been a sabotage scare about the Canal earlier in the year and FDR was worried about its safety. He proposed building a secure anchorage for the fleet on the Pacific side against the danger that the Canal could be closed by saboteurs when the fleet was halfway through.
Looking back years later, Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner, a senior plans officer, felt that the sampans could have been used to scout for hostile fleets approaching the Hawaiian Islands.Mahope Joe didn't remind the president about the matter until five months had passed. He apologized for the delay. The Commerce Department prepared a proposal that was sent to Congress in January 1935. It failed of passage.{10}
FDR worried the Big Five. Before he had ‘come down' to Hawaii, he had talked about adjusting sugar quotas to favor Puerto Rico, which he considered a poorhouse compared to Hawaii. A 1934 law actually lumped Hawaii with foreign producers of sugar. Obviously, territorial status wasn't much protection from a hostile administration in Washington. So one of the first things Republican Samuel Wilder King did on being elected was to introduce a statehood bill in Congress. If nothing else, his bill stimulated a rash of visits to Hawaii by junketing Congressmen who investigated the merits of statehood along with the fleshpots of Waikiki.(11)
Opinions on the admissibility of Hawaii varied with the expert. The leading hurdle, of course, was the large population of Japanese who were widely believed to be subversive. General Briant Wells, who retired to become head of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association, scoffed at the wild tales of possible treachery by kitchen maids and gardeners which made the rounds of the service clubs. But he was succeeded by Hugh Drum, who had another view. Drum wrote:
"After a visit to each of these islands and several conferences with leading American residents thereof, I am convinced that few of the Orientals will be loyal in case of war."
Drum organized a ‘Service Command' to rally loyal Hawaiians. He told the visiting House Military Affairs Subcommittee:" It is the experience of all nations, including the United States, that mixtures of widely dissimilar racial elements constitute a serious problem in time of emergency. The history of our own revolution, of the war of 1812, of the War Between the States, and of the World War, shows that during an emergency armed forces are often necessary to protect loyal citizens as against disaffected and rebellious ones. Since this has been true on the mainland where the racial makeup is far more homogeneous, certainly we must be prepared to meet such a situation in the Hawaiian Islands where the population is conglomerate."
In an Armistice Day speech, Drum had come out for martial law in case of war.(12)
A few months later a Japanese naval detachment made a friendly visit to Honolulu. Some of the sailors visited the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, whose towers were among the higher points along Waikiki, where they got up on the roof with a big camera and proceeded to pan around the horizon. The authorities sent a report of the incident to Washington, where it came to the attention of Acting Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison, son of the inventor, and Chief of Naval Operations William Standley, an old golfing partner of FDR's. On August 10th they took it to the White House.
Nineteen thirty-six, as far as the Navy was concerned, might have been called the Year of the Spy. On the Pacific Coast a yeoman, Harry Thompson, had been spotted working for the Japanese. When the judge excoriated him for a traitor, other guilty parties lined up for sentencing shrank away from him. Then there was the Farnsworth case in Washington, involving an officer. The version given out was that Farnsworth, who went by the incredible nickname Dodo, wouldn't have been caught at all, except for a tip by a newsman that Dodo had offered him the story of his spying in exchange for a sum of money and twenty-four hours start for Germany on the zeppelin Hindenburg..
In such an atmosphere, Edison and Standley were well advised to take their story to the chief. Roosevelt hit the roof. He sent Standley a note:" One obvious thought occurs to me-- that every Japanese citizen or non-citizen who meets these Japanese ships or had any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be first to be placed in a concentration camp in case of trouble. As I told you verbally today, I think a Joint Board should consider and adopt plans relating to the Japanese population of all the islands."
The president was overreacting. Such gathering of information during calls at friendly ports was routine. There weren't any federal laws against taking pictures. The Hawaiian authorities understood that entertainment of Japanese sailors by kinsmen was part of the Japanese consulate's efforts to cement ties to the homeland.
FDR went on to order up positive recommendations from the Joint Board of the Army and Navy. He wanted to know:" What plans have been made relative to concentration camps in the Hawaiian Islands for dangerous or undesirable aliens in the event of national emergency?"
The president's instructions showed that he was familiar with the ‘problems' of Hawaii. Back in 1913, when he was assistant secretary of the navy, the army command figured on expelling the local Japanese from its defensive positions, if war should break out. In 1921, the plan was to evacuate Japanese to the mainland.
The president's defense advisers were considerably more low-keyed. Assistant Secretary of the Army Harry Woodring reported on the Army's current plans. He told the president that the Hawaiian command envisioned ‘controlling' the Japanese during an emergency, that it was even setting up a Service Command for this purpose. General Drum's idea. Woodring didn't even mention concentration camps.
Woodring's position was to be the Army's consistent position. General Wells had concluded that it would be crazy and asking for trouble to intern any great number of Hawaii's Japanese. After all they made up two out of five of the population, were an irreplaceable part of the labor force, and despite being wooed by the Japanese consulate showed no signs of meditating subversion.
The Joint Board was equally restrained when in response to the president's directive, it examined the problem of espionage in Hawaii. The Board told the president that, indeed, a list of Japanese was kept who would be the first to be interned in case of trouble. But it pointed out that control of espionage was impossible in time of peace. Hawaii would have to be declared a military reservation, and its ports closed to international shipping. Besides, Pearl Harbor's natural setting, surrounded by hills, made it a goldfish bowl.
Perhaps because a presidential election intervened, six months went by with nothing from the White House. But in May 1937, an interdepartmental committee was established, and out of the committee's work eventually came legislation regarding the taking of pictures in sensitive areas.(13)
Partly in response to warnings from his longtime friend Bill Bullitt, who had become disillusioned by his experiences as ambassador to the Soviet Union, by the summer of 1936 the president became concerned over spying and subversion by foreign powers. Two weeks after he called the Joint Board, he arranged for the FBI, which at that time had no jurisdiction in the field, to begin a study of fascist and communist groups in the United States.(14)