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"A Foreign Land?" But in the end the argument would come down to Hawaii's racial situation. And the uneasiness which that aroused would not be confined to the Southern Senator who, thinking of anti-poll tax and anti-lynching bills, told Farrington dourly: "I know how your people would vote." The late Nicholas Murray Butler, president emeritus of Columbia University, wrote last summer: "In population, in language, and in economic life [Hawaii] is distinctly a foreign land. . . . [Its people] are not and could not be members of the United States of America in any true sense."
Such an argument angers all Hawaiians, even those who are opposed to statehood. They have never shared the mainland's or the Navy's hysteria over the Massie case. They have watched the melting together of races in their islands—a blending which has produced some extraordinarily striking women and is not limited to the lowest strata but spreads to the middle class and, occasionally, even touches the top crust. There is probably less race prejudice and discrimination in Hawaii than in any place on earth where mixed races live together.
The Gentleman from Hawaii. In the territorial Senate there are now seven Caucasians, six part-Hawaiians, one Japanese, one Chinese. In the House there are twelve Caucasians, ten Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians, five Japanese and three Chinese. Why shouldn't a U.S. Senator be of Japanese blood, Farrington demands?
White Hawaiians are convinced of the Americanism of their American-Japanese. They point to the record of the Japanese population. Before the Pearl Harbor attack and throughout the war, Naval Intelligence turned up not a single incident of sabotage. Hawaiians also point to the magnificent record in Europe of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, all of whose enlisted men and some of whose officers were Nisei, and who won, man for man, more decorations than any other Army unit in World War II.
But U.S. citizens could not soon forget the deeds of the Nisei's brothers, those other Japanese. Such contradictions in behavior left Americans in a dilemma. General MacArthur advocated statehood for Hawaii because he believed that such action would support his efforts to democratize Japan and presumably because he saw a difference between Japanese raised under the Empire and Japanese raised under a democracy.
The world's colored races would listen carefully to the Senate's debate. The U.S. had already given freedom to the Philippines and had given Puerto Rico the right to elect her own governor. This was traditional U.S. policy: to forswear imperialism and grant self-government to colonial peoples.
Hawaiians thought that they, too, were entitled to the benefits of that policy. For the U.S., then, the alternatives were Hawaiian statehood—which Alaska also would watch with interest—or Hawaiian independence. The second alternative would shock mainlanders and Hawaiians alike, and was not even seriously discussed. But one way or another, the Senate had to answer the people who were knocking at the Union's door.