Captive Paradise: A History of Hawaii (51 page)

Prince Kuhio, who unseated Wilcox in the 1902 election, was leading an interesting life. During the year he served in prison, his fiancée, Elizabeth Kahanu Ka‘auwai (younger cousin of Kapi‘olani and niece of Queen Emma’s chaplain Hoapili), sang to him daily and brought him food to keep his spirits up. Upon his release they married and traveled abroad, usually received as royalty, but he also volunteered and fought in the Second Boer War in South Africa. While touring Europe, in one happy aftermath of the Germans’ behavior to his aunt at Queen Victoria’s jubilee, a German duke made an unkind observation about their skin color; Kuhio, drawing upon his superior rank and boxing skill, punched him out.

Back in Hawai‘i, seeing that the Democrats were historically not very successful in matters pertaining to Hawai‘i, and not finding the collection of home-rule sort-of radicals under Wilcox very useful, Kuhio joined the Republican Party. It was a keenly astute move; they were delighted to have the legitimacy of a royal prince in their midst, and they accommodated him in a number of projects. He organized the territorial counties and made certain to staff the civil service positions with natives—a convenient marriage of the ancient watchfulness of the
ali‘i
over his people with modern political patronage. Kuhio died in his tenth term, on January 7, 1922, all too aware that much work remained to restore the stature of the Hawaiian natives. “Stick together,” he enjoined a friend from his deathbed, “and try to agree to the best of your ability to meet the most important problem: the rehabilitation of our race.”
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Kuhio died with some hope that he had helped achieve that, although his bill to establish Hawaiian statehood, which was the first, went nowhere. He had better expectations of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, an attempt to undo the evils of the Great
Mahele
of 1848. In the preceding few years leases on about a quarter of a million acres had expired, and for native rehabilitation Hawaiians of 50 percent blood or more were allowed to apply for homesteads. Wise to the flaws of the
Mahele
, they would lease the land and not be able to turn around and sell it. To overcome opposition, productive cane fields were excluded from homesteading, and for environmental protection (rather a first for the islands), forest reserves were excluded as well. Kuhio did not live to see the act misfire on about the same scale as the
Mahele
, this time because
kanakas
were given leases to inferior and often remote and unproductive lands. To the Anglo governor of the territory, however, the act removed the pressure for the government to step in and further “help” anybody. To his way of thinking, the
kanakas
had had land made available to them, and if they could not improve their lives by it, that was their own fault.
5

With the stability of American sovereignty, Lorrin Andrews Thurston began a long slow mellowing from walleyed firebrand to a leading private citizen who steadily advanced the interests of the territory. During the years of the provisional government he had remarried (his first wife having died in childbirth) and with annexation, aged forty, he stood down from active politics and bought the
Pacific Commercial Advertiser
, an admirable platform from which to pursue his projects. Some of them came to nought. After World War I he backed legislation to restrict the activities of Japanese-language schools, but the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down. He was ahead of his time in trying to ban billboards, but he was prescient in the promotion of tourism as a contributor to the islands’ economy. Thurston understood the economic boon that shiploads of sightseers, especially from the mother country, would bring to Hawai‘i. He was an amateur vulcanologist, and as a boy on Maui he had often led tourists up the ten-thousand-foot ascent of Haleakala. Now he was instrumental in creating Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

Also important to developing tourism in the territory was a visit in 1907 by America’s most celebrated writer, the novelist and social critic Jack London. The recent author of
The Call of the Wild
(1903),
The Sea-Wolf
(1904), and
White Fang
(1906) felt that he had exhausted the literary possibilities from his gold-seeking trek to the Yukon, and had come in search of a whole new universe of story ideas. He sailed to Hawaii in his own thirty-five-foot yacht, the
Snark
, with his wife and a small crew, having (rather dangerously, but typically for him) taught himself navigation while en route.

Thurston, vigorously seconded by Lucius Pinkham, secretary of the Board of Health, importuned London to visit Moloka‘i and the much-maligned leper colony there, and write a piece showing that it was not the hopeless hellhole it was commonly believed to be. Indeed, as London himself had neared Honolulu and the
Snark
entered the Kaiwi Channel, they passed Moloka‘i and London pointed it out to his crewman Martin Johnson as the most cursed spot on earth. Now London accepted Thurston’s challenge. He and his wife, Charmian, crossed the channel to Kalaupapa and stayed two days, celebrating the Fourth of July with its residents, practicing on their shooting range with them, and interviewing the doctors and nurses. They were impressed with the colony’s superintendent, Jack McVeigh, who in five years’ residency had stemmed the slide into drunken despair. London gratified Thurston with a brave, frank article under the title “The Lepers of Molokai” in a leading magazine, the
Woman’s Home Companion
, depicting the colony in a more positive light. It was, according to Thurston, “a value to Hawaii that cannot be estimated in gold and silver.”

Also in London’s crew on the
Snark
, however, was another young man named Bert Stolz. Once in Honolulu he revealed to London that his purpose in working for his passage to Hawai‘i was to visit the grave of his father, Deputy Sheriff Louis Stolz, shot down by a native named Ko‘olau, who had been diagnosed with leprosy, evaded capture, and hidden in the mountains of Kaua‘i for more than two years, until his death.
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In response London wrote the short story “Koolau the Leper,” which depicted in London’s famously clinical style the horrors of the disease and the terror of natives desperate to avoid capture. Thurston was furious with him, referring to him as a “sneak of the first water, a thoroughly untrustworthy man and an ungrateful and untruthful bounder,” turns of phrase that Lili‘uokalani might well have used of Thurston.

Of greater importance to Hawai‘i’s fledgling tourism industry, Jack London also discovered surfing. It had been a royal sport for generations, the massive size and weight of those early surfboards providing sufficient testimony to the strength of those who indulged. Mark Twain was aware of its existence during his visit in 1866, and wrote of its pursuit as lunatic. During the missionary period it had declined, along with chants, hula, and other aspects of the native culture. As headline-making celebrities, London and his wife were lodged in a beach house at Waikiki near the Swimming Club, with whose members he became familiar. Electrified at his first sight of surfing, he determined to teach himself but made a failure of it for over an hour. His efforts were spied by Alexander Hume Ford, a South Carolina journalist who had been traveling to Australia, stopped in Hawai‘i to see if he could learn to surf, and had never left. He gave London the necessary tips and launched him onto a likely wave, which London rode, breathless, all the way to the beach. “From that moment,” he wrote, “I was lost.” Again for the
Woman’s Home Companion
, he wrote “A Royal Sport: Surfing in Waikiki,” describing the sight of a native surfer:

And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward … appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing white. His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his limbs—his feet planted in the churning foam, the salt rising to his knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight, and he is flying through the air, flying forward.… He is a Mercury, a brown Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea.
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Once he learned how, London surfed for hours, whooping, unable to come in from the blistering tropical sun. He was bedridden for the next four days with what the doctor called the worst sunburn he had ever seen, but his article and the force of his celebrity behind it firmly established surfing as part of Hawai‘i’s identity.

A. H. Ford, for his part, shortly sought funding from Queen Emma’s estate to establish the Hawaiian Outrigger Canoe Club, which was founded on May 1, 1908, with surfing as an integral part, neighboring the Moana Hotel. Their facility boasted dressing rooms and a traditional grass hut for storing surfboards. The club thrived, and began staging competitions with the already ongoing
hui nalu
, a native surfing group that regularized its existence in 1911. One of its founders, Duke Paoa Kahinu Kahanamoku, was only just beginning a long career of spreading the gospel of surfing. He carried it to Australia in 1915 and caused a sensation there, while another surfer whom London wrote about in his article, the Irish-Hawaiian George Freeth, gave a demonstration in California at the invitation of Henry Huntington to promote one of his railroads. On his return visit to Hawai‘i in 1915, London was stunned to see that the Outrigger Canoe Club had grown to more than twelve hundred members. Hawaiian tourism was on its way.

While in Hawai‘i in 1907 London also became friends with Prince David Kawananakoa. The two went fishing by torchlight, one of many experiences that London had in Hawai‘i that caused him to rethink his previous advocacy of “racialism,” which was supplanted by an appreciation of the native culture. Kawananakoa at thirty-eight was in the last year of his life before the family hopes would fall on his small son—but Lili‘uokalani was still very much alive, although bitter
8
and usually reclusive within Washington Place. She did respond to invitations to state occasions and events that she thought important for the unity of her people, although the rebuke of her presence could dampen a festive atmosphere. A famous photograph captures her seated, her hair now quite white, with Sanford Dole and territorial governor Lucius Pinkham, brought together for a concert to promote the Allied cause in World War I. Standing behind them is Henry Berger, for forty years conductor of the (Royal) Hawaiian Band. They all look miserable. The legislature had voted her a pension of four thousand dollars per year and the income from a large sugar plantation that had belonged to her brother—but she did not regard that as much compared to the losses for which she repeatedly sued, without success.

On their return visit to Hawai‘i in 1915, Jack and Charmian London were presented to her at a New Year’s Day party. Charmian was struck by the former queen’s “narrow black eyes [which] gave the impression of being implacably savage in their cold hatred of everything American.… I offered her a dubious paw, which she touched gingerly, as if she would much prefer to slap it.”
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Lili‘uokalani was seventy-nine when she passed away on November 11, 1917, and was accorded a state funeral and interment in the Kalakaua vault at Mauna ‘Ala. Little remarked in the American press was the death of another elderly lady in Hawai‘i on December 20, 1928, which marked the end of an era. Elizabeth La‘anui Pratt was ninety-four, great-grandniece of the Conqueror and last surviving graduate of the Royal School. Late in her life she wrote a paean to her great-great-grandfather titled
Keoua, Father of Kings
, a precursor of literary interest in Hawaiian royal history and genealogy.

Considering that Hawaiian annexation was far less about sugar than it was about denying a coaling station to a frightening new generation of Japanese battleships, the United States was quite slow to actually develop Pearl Harbor. Blowing up the coral bar to the lochs and scooping out a channel two hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep began in 1900, followed by massive dredging to deepen the harbor. An actual naval base was not authorized until 1908, when some port facilities and a drydock were begun. This first attempt at a drydock was nearly completed when it spectacularly collapsed, and World War I had come and gone before it was fixed and finished. United States neutrality in the early years of that conflict reinforced Hawai‘i’s critical location, as German vessels called freely to resupply. German ships then in port were impounded with America’s sudden entry into that conflict in 1917.

The international naval disarmament treaty of 1925 drew attention away from Pearl Harbor, but loss of confidence in that agreement preceded massive development starting in 1931 into a fully serviced fleet anchorage. By the end of that decade, with Europe again embroiled in war, Pearl Harbor fulfilled Captain Mahan’s vision of it as America’s forward defense bastion—not that it did them much good on December 7, 1941.

*   *   *

In one tragic way, the thirties also reminded the native Hawaiians that they had become strangers in their own land, as a sensational murder provided an object lesson in mainland-style justice for dark-skinned people. On the night of September 12, 1931, navy wife Thalia Massie, who did not like to drink or dance, accompanied her submariner husband Thomas and several of his friends to the Ala Wai Inn, a restaurant and dancing venue in Waikiki.
10
Late in the evening one of his friends said something fresh to Thalia; she slapped him and left, intending to make her way home alone. She was beaten and alleged that she was raped by a carload of locals: two Japanese, one Chinese-Hawaiian, and two Hawaiians. It was not the joyriders’ only incident that evening, and after being apprehended for the other trouble they quickly fell under suspicion for the Massie assault.

Adm. Yates Stirling, a Southerner commanding Pearl Harbor, was frank in his assessment that some rope and a strong tree would see justice done. At trial, however, want of evidence resulted in hanging the jury instead. Of five whites and seven nonwhites on the panel, there were five votes to convict, seven to acquit. The American community was outraged. Thalie Massie’s mother, Grace Fortescue, rushed out from the mainland to comfort her daughter. After the trial, in company with her son-in-law and others, they seized, beat, and shot dead Joe Kahahawai, who was visibly the darkest of the rape defendants. Grace Fortescue, Thomas Massie, and others were apprehended with Kahahawai’s body wrapped in a sheet, intending to dump him off Koko Head. They were tried for murder, defended by Clarence Darrow, convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years. Admiral Stirling, however, brought pressure to bear on the territorial governor, Lawrence Judd, who commuted their sentences to one hour to be served in his office. Race relations in Hawai‘i probably reached their lowest ebb ever as the
kanakas
realized what American justice would mean for them. Of equal significance, the scandal set the campaign for statehood back by decades—not because of any perceived deficiency in the justice system, but because it caused members of Congress to question whether it was any benefit to the country to admit a state populated by violent, dark-skinned people.