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Rising Star. Joe Farrington, however, is not dismayed (one of his favorite poems is Invictus).
Born during a trip his parents took to Washington, Joe is, nevertheless, a thoroughgoing Hawaiian. He went to a private Hawaiian school established for the children of missionaries and native chiefs. He won a cup for doing "most for the school."
Later he studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin, roomed with Philip La Follette, who was to become governor of the state, went to work for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and married Mary Elizabeth Pruett, a missionary's daughter whom he had courted at the university. In 1923, the Farringtons returned to Honolulu. There Joe was managing editor of the Star-Bulletin, which his father had bought. At Wallace Farrington's death, Joe became general manager and president.
One of the effects of the Massie case was to put Farrington into politics. Washington, alarmed by the demonstrated laxity of Honolulu's police, tried to usurp some of the territory's prerogatives. Farrington was made secretary of a committee which staved off such federal intrusion. On that record and on a platform advocating statehood, he ran for the territorial Senate and got elected. Hawaiians favored statehood by more than two to one in a 1940 plebiscite.
Farrington's political star continued to rise. He was elected Delegate to Congress in 1942, re-elected in 1944. Last year the election was held amidst the hysteria of the sugar strike. While almost everyone in the islands took a firm position on the strike, Farrington ordered his paper to steer a course of careful neutrality. This won him the endorsement of the C.I.O.-P.A.C., and overwhelming reelection. Some of his old business friends and his rival publisher, Lorrin Thurston of the Advertiser, have never forgiven him.
With his political success assured, Farrington returned to Washington and his duties as Delegate to Congress. There he lives in a red brick house near Rock Creek Park with his wife and their two adopted children (Beverly, 23, John, 12). He talks and thinks Hawaii, and behaves like a Hawaiian, taking three or four showers a day, changing from the skin out each time, an old Hawaiian custom.
Respectable & Mature. Last week he marshaled the arguments for statehood. Would the Senate be influenced by the nervous murmurings of conservative Hawaiian businessmen? It was hard to see how it could. The state of California, for example, also has Harry Bridges, labor unrest and a Communist menace. No one has yet suggested expelling California from the Union.
Hawaii has assets which the Senate could not overlook. She has respectability and maturity; she is no poor relation. She exported $132.6 million of goods to the U.S. in 1946 and provided a market for $227 million of mainland products. In fiscal 1947 she paid a total of $107 million in internal revenue and customs into the U.S. Treasury, while federal expenditures on Hawaii, exclusive of military expenditures, amounted to only $3.3 million. She paid more federal income tax than twelve states.