The Pittsburgh Press (September 10, 1946)
Ruark: Democratic Hawaii
By Robert C. Ruark
NEW YORK – The Territory of Hawaii, abetted by Cap Krug of the Interior Department, is busily plumping for inclusion into the United States as a legitimate member of the family, rather than remain in its current wood’s-colt status.
Many an ex-serviceman will remember Hawaii, and especially the Island of Oahu, as the frustration center of the world, peopled exclusively by citizens who loudly resented the G.I. presence while simultaneously waxing rich off G.I. dough.
Hemmed in by the curfew, cursed as intruders by the Kamainas, or old-timers, and surrounded by strange, foreign faces and a babel of foreign tongues, the rockbound G.I. generally wound up despising Hawaii and its people. The tendency now is to condemn it as a foreign outpost with no more claim to statehood than, say, Guam.
I hated the place while I was there, because a serviceman found himself in the position of living in a dreamy tropical paradise whose delights, denied him, made him feel like a lifer in Alcatraz, nightly watching the tantalizing lights of San Francisco.
Melting pot of the East
But nobody can deny that Hawaii is one of the more successful examples of working democracy, and has, from a standpoint of racial tolerance and co-operation, more of a right to statehood than some of our Southern states.
Oahu is the melting pot of the East, with all the European breeds thrown in. But out of a babel of barbaric tongues and a welter of colors and creeds, additionally complicated by crossbreeding, they build a pretty workable piece of living and mutual respect.
Oahu, the island on which is Honolulu, is peopled by Americans and English, Chinese and Japs, Polynesians from Hawaii and Samoa, Melanesians from the islands of the Southwest Pacific, Portuguese and Germans, Filipinos and Chamorros – the dangdest racial goulash you ever saw.
A typical Hawaiian girl might be a mixture of a half-dozen races.
But no especial point will be made of her child’s antecedents. He can run for and be elected to the legislature and nobody heaves a smear at him because he isn’t all white or all brown or all yellow. He walks around with his head high and his vote safe.
It is true that the big racial groups – the Chinese, Japs, pure whites and the Polynesians – live largely to themselves, from preference. But they meet on fairly pleasant political and business footing, and they marry outside their race as often as not.
The minority group in Hawaii is made up of the pure white, and he lacks the facilities of Jim Crow himself. If he has been pleased to thicken his bloodline with an infusion of brown it doesn’t brand him. What Sen. Bilbo of Mississippi might be pleased to call a mongrel, in the islands, brags that his blood includes a dash of native Polynesian, much as many Americans proudly cite their strain of Indian.
Can give Mississippi lessons
Hawaii’s heavy Japanese population refrained, with small exception, from allegiance to Japan during the war. And no prouder battle record was compiled by anybody than by the Nisei battalions who fought in Europe.
Any Jap-American soldier who came home with less than three clusters on his Purple Heart was regarded as a sissy, and the death lists were thick, daily, with names like Tanaka, Osuka, Takahara.
If Hawaii’s racial complexity is considered as a factor against its possible inclusion as a state, the detractors can stop right now. As a democracy, the Hawaiian Islands can give all sorts of lessons to Mississippi… or, for that matter, to Maine.