Of course it is easy to suggest reasons, to say that after all Hawaii has already lived through one war, or to point out that Honolulu is even now in a war zone, steeped in the vocabulary of the military, deeply committed to the business of war. But it runs deeper than that. War is viewed with a curious ambivalence in Hawaii because the largest part of its population interprets war, however unconsciously, as a force for good, an instrument of social progress. And of course it was precisely World War II which cracked the spine of sugar feudalism, opened up a contracting economy and an immobile society, shattered forever the pleasant but formidable colonial world in which a handful of families controlled everything Hawaii did, where it shopped, how it shipped its goods, who could come in and how far they could go and at what point they would be closed out.
We have, most of us, some image of prewar Hawaii. We have heard the phrase “Big Five,” and we have a general notion that certain families acquired a great deal of money and power in Hawaii and kept that money and that power for a very long while. The reality of Hawaiian power was at once more obvious and more subtle than one might imagine it to have been. The Big Five companies — C. Brewer, Theo. H. Davies, American Factors, Castle Cooke, and Alexander Baldwin — began as “factors” for the sugar planters; in effect they were plantation management. Over the years, the Big Five families and a few others — the Dillinghams, say, who were descended from a stranded sailor who built Hawaii’s first railroad — intermarried, sat on one another’s boards, got into shipping and insurance and money, and came to comprise a benevolent oligarchy unlike any on the mainland.
For almost half a century this interlocking directorate extended into every area of Hawaiian life, and its power could be exercised immediately and personally. American Factors, for example, owned (and still owns) the major Hawaiian department store, Liberty House. In 1941, Sears, Roebuck, working secretly through intermediaries, bought land for a store in suburban Honolulu. Sears finally opened its store, but not until the Sears president, Robert E. Wood, had threatened to buy his own ship; there had been some question as to whether Matson Navigation, controlled by Castle Cooke and Alexander Baldwin, would ship merchandise for anyone so baldly attempting to compete with a Big Five enterprise.
That was Hawaii. And then World War II came. Island boys went to war, and came home with new ideas. Mainland money came in, against all Island opposition. After World War II, the late Walter Dillingham could come down to a public hearing from his house on Diamond Head and cast at Henry Kaiser the most meaningful epithet of ante-bellum Hawaii—”visitor”—and have its significance lost on perhaps half his audience. In spirit if never quite in fact, World War II made everyone a Dillingham, and anyone in Hawaii too slow to perceive this for himself was constantly told it, by politicians and by labor leaders and by mainland observers.
The extent of the change, of course, has often been overstated, for reasons sometimes sentimental and sometimes strategic, but it is true that Hawaii is no more what it once was. There is still only one “Lowell” in Honolulu, and that is Lowell Dillingham, still only one “Ben,” and that is his brother — but Ben Dillingham was overwhelmingly defeated in his 1962 campaign for the United States Senate by Daniel Inouye, a Nisei. (In the 1920’s, when a congressional committee asked Ben Dillingham’s father and Henry Baldwin why so few Japanese voted in Hawaii, they could suggest only that perhaps the Japanese were under instructions from Tokyo not to register.) There is still a strong feeling in old-line Honolulu that the Big Five “caved in” to labor — but Jack Hall, the tough I. L. W. U. leader who was once convicted under the Smith Act for conspiring to teach the overthrow of the United States Government by force and violence, now sits on the board of the Hawaii Visitors’ Bureau and commends the ladies of the Outdoor Circle for their efforts in “preserving the loveliness that is Hawaii.” And Chinn Ho, who as a schoolboy used to chalk up quotations for a downtown broker, now owns not only a few score million dollars’ worth of real estate but also that broker’s own house, out on Diamond Head, hard by Ben Dillingham’s. “The thing is,” the broker s niece told me, “I suppose he wanted it when he was fourteen.”
But perhaps there is no clearer way to understand the change than to visit Punahou School, the school the missionaries founded “for their children and their children’s children,” a statement of purpose interpreted rather literally until quite recently. To leaf through Punahou’s old class books is a briefing in Hawaiian oligarchy, for the same names turn up year after year, and the names are the same as those which appear in cut stone or discreet brass letters down around what Honolulu calls The Street, Merchant Street, down on those corners where the Big Five have their offices and most Island business is done. In 1881 an Alexander delivered the commencement address and a Dillingham the commencement poem; at the 1882 graduation a Baldwin spoke on “Chinese Immigration,” an Alexander on “Labor Ipse Voluptas,” and a Bishop on “Sunshine.” And although high-caste Hawaiians have always coexisted with and in fact intermarried with the white oligarchy, their Punahou classmates usually visualized them, when it came time for class prophecies, “playing in a band.”
It is not that Punahou is not still the school of the Island power elite; it is. “There will always be room at Punahou for those children who belong here,” Dr. John Fox, headmaster since 1944, assured alumni in a recent bulletin. But where in 1944 there were 1, 100 students and they had a median IQ of 108, now there are 3, 400 with a median IQ of 125. Where once the enrollment was ten percent Oriental, now it is a fraction under thirty percent. And so it is that outside Punahou’s new Cooke Library, where the archives are kept by a great-great-granddaughter of the Reverend Hiram Bingham, there sit, among the plumeria blossoms drifted on the steps, small Chinese boys with their books in Pan American flight bags.
“John Fox is rather controversial, I guess you know,” old-family alumni will sometimes say now, but they do not say exactly wherein the controversy lies. Perhaps because Hawaii sells itself so assiduously as the very model of a modern melting pot, the entire area of race relations is conversationally delicate. “I wouldn’t exactly say we had discrimination here,” one Honolulu woman explained tactfully. “I’d say we had a wonderful, wonderful competitive feeling.” Another simply shrugs. “It’s just something that’s never pressed. The Orientals are — well, discreet’s not really the word, but they aren’t like the Negroes and the Jews, they don’t push in where they’re not wanted.”
Even among those who are considered Island liberals, the question of race has about it, to anyone who has lived through these hypersensitive past years on the mainland, a curious and rather engaging ingenuousness. “There are very definitely people here who know the Chinese socially,” one woman told me. “They have them to their houses. The uncle of a friend of mine, for example, has Chinn Ho to his house all the time.” Although this seemed a statement along the lines of “Some of my best friends are Rothschilds,” I accepted it in the spirit in which it was offered — just as I did the primitive progressivism of an Island teacher who was explaining, as we walked down a corridor of her school, about the miracles of educational integration the war had wrought. “Look,” she said suddenly, grabbing a pretty Chinese girl by the arm and wheeling her around to face me. “You wouldn’t have seen this here before the war. Look at those eyes.”
And so, in the peculiar and still insular mythology of Hawaii, the dislocations of war became the promises of progress. Whether or not the promises have been fulfilled depends of course upon who is talking, as does whether or not progress is a virtue, but in any case it is war that is pivotal to the Hawaiian imagination, war that fills the mind, war that seems to hover over Honolulu like the rain clouds on Tantalus. Not very many people talk about that. They talk about freeways on Oahu and condominiums on Maui and beer cans at the Sacred Falls and how much wiser it is to bypass Honolulu altogether in favor of going directly to Laurance Rockefeller’s Mauna Kea, on Hawaii. (In fact the notion that the only place to go in the Hawaiian Islands is somewhere on Maui or Kauai or Hawaii has by now filtered down to such wide acceptance that one can only suspect Honolulu to be due for a revival.) Or, if they are of a more visionary turn, they talk, in a kind of James Michener rhetoric, about how Hawaii is a multiracial paradise and a labor-management paradise and a progressive paradise in which the past is now reconciled with the future, where the I. L. WUs Jack Hall lunches at the Pacific Club and where that repository of everything old-line in Hawaii, the Bishop Estate, works hand in hand with Henry Kaiser to transform Koko Head into a $350 million development named Hawaii Kai. If they are in the travel business they talk about The Million Visitor Year (1970) and The Two Million Visitor Year (1980) and twenty thousand Rotarians convening in Honolulu in 1969, and they talk about The Product. “The reports show what we need,” one travel man told me. “We need more attention to shaping and molding the product.” The product is the place they live.