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One September night in 1931, a doe-eyed young woman in a green evening dress, bored with a gay party at Honolulu's Aia Wai Inn, wandered outside and along John Ena Road. She was the wife of a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, and her name was Thalia Massie.
By the story she told later, five men seized her, drove her away in an auto, beat her and raped her. Five men of mixed Hawaiian and Asiatic blood were arrested and accused of the crime. When they were let out on bail, Thalia Massie's Kentucky-born, Annapolis-bred husband, with the help of Thalia's socialite mother and two enlisted men, kidnaped one of them—a massive man named Joe Kahahawai. They shot him and drained out his blood in a water-filled bathtub.
The lynch plot was discovered. Lieut. Thomas Massie and his collaborators were arrested and convicted of manslaughter —then freed after serving a sentence of one hour. The rape charges against the five men (including the murdered Kahahawai) were dropped for lack of evidence.
The Massie case was an unprecedented flare-up in Hawaiian race relations. But its melodramatic aspects awakened the first general interest that the people of the mainland U.S. had ever shown in their neglected Pacific paradise, 2,400 miles west of San Francisco's Golden Gate. The luridly revealed racial complexities of the territory became the subject of scandalized interest on the mainland, and touched off a deep national uneasiness. In the hysteria, fanned by U.S. editors playing up a gaudy story, and by the U.S. Navy, which saw its gold-buttoned dignity assailed, some U.S. newspapers even tacitly condoned the lynching of Joe Kahaha-wai.
Acid Test. Now, 15 years after the Massie case, the nation is confronted again by the problem of Hawaii's races,* and in a way which will reawaken in the U.S. Senate something of the same uneasiness aroused by the Massie affair. Hawaii is knocking at the nation's door. After almost half a century of territorial status, she wants to be admitted as the 49th state. Her aggressive spokesman is Joseph Farrington, an influential publisher, son of an immigrant from the mainland, and Hawaii's Delegate to the U.S. Congress.
The campaign has been partly successful. Last summer, with a brief discussion and a 196-to-133 vote, the House approved statehood for Hawaii. Next month the Senate will send Oregon's Guy Cordon to make another one of several congressional on-the-spot investigations. When the Senate takes a vote in its regular session next year, democracy will get an acid test. But it will be the mainland's democracy which gets the test. For Hawaii is the most democratic area under the U.S. flag.
Garden of Eden. In the travel-bureau ads, Hawaii is the Garden of Eden. As far as oceanographers are concerned, it is a well-nigh totally submerged volcanic range spread across 2,000 miles of ocean. Its economic orbit includes six chief islands, of which Kauai is furthest west. The archipelago's commercial heart is the city of Honolulu (pop. 267,000), on Oahu, which is Eden—with a touch of Indianapolis.
Last week Honolulu stores sold grass skirts, wooden roses and jade jewelry, while traffic honked around neighboring Piggly Wiggly stores and office buildings which looked as if they had been moved, stone by stone, from the Midwest.