Hawaii (165 page)

"Agreed," the plantation men muttered, and the strike was on.

When policies had been set and the meeting adjourned, the plantation owners stood nervously about the room, unwilling to leave, and Hale asked, "How did a decent young man like Goro Sakagawa, with three brothers in Punahou, 'become a communist?"

Janders replied, "I think he was assigned to the A.F. of L. in Japan."

A paH settled over The Fort. John Whipple Hoxworth mused: "To think that our government took a decent Japanese boy and instructed him in labor tactics!" Something of the world's maniacal contradiction seeped into the room and mocked the managers, and Hoxworth Hale asked sadly, "You mean that a boy who might have gone to Punahou was perverted by our own government?" On this gloomy note the first meeting of The Fort's strike committee ended.

Actually, when Hewlett Janders accused Goro Sakagawa of being a communist he was not far from the truth. When The Fort, in 1916, 1923, 1928, 1936, 1939 and 1946, refused point-blank even to discuss unionism and used every known device including force and subversion to block labor from attaining any of its legitimate ends, it made .normal unionization of the islands impossible. The hardhitting but completely American union organizers sent out from the mainland found that in Hawaii customary procedures got nowhere. Not even the vocabulary of unionism was understood, or acknowledged where it was understood, so that both The Fort and the Honolulu Mail invariably referred to any union activity as communism; as a result, over the course of years Hawaii developed its own rather strange definition for terms which on the mainland were understood and accepted as logical parts of modern industrial life. In brief, unionism was subversion.

There were also physical difficulties. Oftentimes mainland men whom the course of history proved to have been rather moderate labor organizers were refused entrance to the islands. If they tried to talk to plantation hands they were bodily thrown off the premises. If they tried to hire a headquarters hall, none was allowed them. They were intimidated, vilified, abused and harassed by charges of communism.

In obedience to Gresham's Law of social change, when the moderates were driven out, the radicals moved in, and from 1944 on, a group of ultra-tough labor men quietly penetrated the islands and

THE GOLDEN MEN

831

among them were many communists, for they had seen from afar that the situation in Hawaii made it a likely spot for the flowering of the communist creed. Among the leaders was a hefty, ugly Irish Catholic from New York named Rod Burke, who had joined the Party in 1927 and who had steadily risen in its ranks until he had reached a position of eminence from which he could be trusted to lead a serious attack upon Hawaii. His first step was to marry a Baltimore Nisei, and this Japanese girl, already a communist, was to prove of great assistance to him in his grand design for capturing the islands.

For example, when Rod Burke met Goro Sakagawa, returning to Hawaii after his instructive labor experiences in Japan, Burke instantly spotted the capable young army captain as the kind of person he required for the unionization and subsequently the communiza-tion of Hawaii. So Burke said to his Japanese wife, "Get young Sakagawa lined up," and the dedicated Nisei girl succeeded in enlisting Goro not as a communist but as a labor organizer, and through him Burke conscripted other Japanese and Filipinos without confiding to them his membership in the Communist Party. In this way a solid-core labor movement was founded which in 1947 stood ready to confront The Fort and fight to the rugged, island-breaking end. In later years Goro Sakagawa often discussed these beginnings with his lawyer brother Shigeo, back from an honors degree at Harvard, and he allowed Shig to probe his motives and understandings as they existed in early 1947. "Did you know then that Rod Burke was a communist?" Shig asked.

"Well, I never knew for sure, but I guessed he was," Goro explained. "He never gave me any proof. But I recognized him as a tough-minded operator."

"If you had these suspicions, Goro, why were you willing to hook up with him?"

"I realized from experience that old-style methods would never break The Fort. We tried reasonable unionism and got nowhere. Burke knew how to apply power. That's the only thing The Fort understood."

"Did Burke ever try to sign you up in the Party?" "No, he figured he could use me and then dump me in favor of the dumber Japanese and Filipinos he did sign up in the Party," Goro explained.

"How did he select his men?"

"Well, he picked them up where he could. Started enlisting Japanese who didn't know too much . . . Filipinos too. But they were just for support. The real guts of the Party was Rod Burke and his wife."

"Where did that leave you?" Shig explored. "I figured just like Burke," Goro explained. "I figured I was smart enough to use him and then dump him."

"Must have been a very interesting period," Shig said wryly. "There were no illusions on either side," Goro confessed. "Funny

832

HAWAII

thing is that my wife, Akemi, figured the Burkes out the first time she saw them. She'd come up against a lot of communists in Japan, and she spotted Mrs. Burke instantly. And I think Mrs. Burke spotted her, so nobody was fooled," Goro assured his brother.

"Did Burke sign up any really good men?" Shig asked.

"Well, most of the Japanese were dopes, pure and simple, but Hany Azechi was as able a man as we ever produced in the islands."

"Looking 'back on it, Goro, do you think the alliance was necessary?"

Goro had often thought about this, especially since he had known so intimately the moderate A.F. of L. men on General MacArthur's team, and he concluded: "If you remember the position taken by The Fort . . . that even a discussion of labor was communism . . . Hell, Shig, I've told you about the time I went in to see Hewlett Janders. He made me stand like a peasant with my cap in my hands. Abused me, ridiculed me. Shig, there was no alternative."

"None?" his brother asked.

"None. Hawaii could never have moved into the twentieth century until the power of The Fort was broken. I alone couldn't have done it. The A.F. of L. men I knew in Japan couldn't have done it. Only a gutter fighter like Rod Burke could have accomplished it."

So when Hewlett Janders announced to the Honolulu Mail that mainland communists were endeavoring to capture the isknds, he was right. And when he charged that Japanese had joined the Party under Rod Burke's leadership, he was also correct. But when he said that the leader of the plantation part of the strike, GOTO Sakagawa, was also a communist, he was not right, but in those tense years the hatred of labor was so great that a relatively minor error like that didn't really matter.

The strike was a brutal, senseless, tearing affair, and it frightened Hawaii as nothing previous had ever done, not even the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Rod Burke moved swiftly to tie up the waterfront so that not a single H & H ship entered Hawaii for five and one half starving, agonized months. The Fort retaliated by cutting credit, so that everyone in the islands felt the pinch.

Goro Sakagawa led his sugar-plantation workers out on strike. The Fort retaliated by suspending all sorts of benefits, so that soon it was not the workers who felt the cruelty of social warfare, but their families.

Rod Burke allowed no cargoes of either sugar or pineapple to leave the islands and no tourists to come in. The Fort retaliated by closing two of its hotels, and the maids and waiters thus thrown out of work were less able to weather the strike than were the hotel owners.

Goro Sakagawa got the pineapple workers to join the strike. The Fort coldly announced that its food-supply warehouses were nearly empty and it could no longer distribute to stores like Kamejiro Sakagawa's, so one shopkeeper after another faced bankruptcy.

THE GOLDEN MEN 833

No man can understand Hawaii who does not understand the great strike. It crippled the isknds to the point of despair. Newsprint ran low and the existence of the papers was threatened. Food diminished to the one-week mark, and many families went hungry. Sugar plantations saw their crops rotting in the parching sunlight. Pineapple fields went untended, and millions upon millions of unrecoverable dollars were lost. Banks watched their normal flow of business halted. Big stores had neither new stocks nor old customers. Doctors went unpaid and dentists saw no patients. The major hotels could serve only inadequate foods, and the very life of the islands ground slowly to a halt.

For a strike in Hawaii was not like a strike in Florida. It was like nothing the mainland ever knew, for in Florida if the waterfront was tied up, food could be imported by train, and if the trains were closed down, men could use trucks, and if they were struck, hungry families could organize car caravans, and if they failed, a desperate man could walk. But in Hawaii when the docks were tied up, there were no alternatives, and the islands came close to prostration. Reasonable industrial relations having proved impractical, stupidity on the part of both capital and kbor nearly destroyed the isknds.

At the beginning of the sixth month Goro Sakagawa, attended by four assistants, marched into the board room of The Fort, waited for the directors of the great pkntations to assemble, and then sat in precisely the chair he had promised Hewlett Janders he would one day occupy, and in that symbolic moment some of the intractable fight went out of him. It was curious that seating oneself in a chair that had been insolently forbidden should affect a man, as if there were hidden emotional channels that ran from his bottom to his brain, but that is what happened. Secure in his chair, Goro said in conciliatory manner, "We think the strike has progressed long enough. We are sure you think the same. Is there not some way to end it?"

"I will not have a Japanese field hand stomp into my office . . ." Hewlett Janders began, but Hoxworth Hale looked at him in pity, as if the horrors of six months had been useless, in that Janders was using the same words he had used when the strike began.

Quietly Goro ignored him and addressed Hale, a tough negotiator: "Mr. Hale, my committee is not going to take cognizance of the fact that your negotiator, Mr. Hewlett Janders, has attacked us for being Japanese, because we know that your cousin, Colonel Mark Whipple, laid down his life that we might be free citizens. We're acting as free citizens, and I think you appreciate that fact."

The gracious tribute to Colonel Whipple softened the meeting, and all remembered what this same Goro Sakagawa, an army captain in those days, had said when it was proposed to bring Mark Whipple's body home from the Vosges Mountains: "Let them bring my brothers home, but Colonel Whipple should sleep in the heart-land of the world, where he died. No isknd is big enough to hold his spirit."

"What new terms have you in mind, Mr. Sakagawa?" Hale asked.

"We will never end the strike unless we get full union recognition," Goro replied, and Hewlett Janders slumped in his chair. He could see it coming: the others were willing to surrender. The communists were about to triumph. But before Hewie could speak, Goro quickly added, "Then, to match your concession, well accept ten cents an hour less."

"Gentlemen," Hoxworth Hale said with fresh hope, "I think Mr. Sakagawa's proposal gives us something to talk about." Subtly the spirit of Colonel Mark Whipple, who had died for these Japanese boys, invaded the room, and Hale asked quietly, "Goro, will you bring your men back in about three hours?"

"I will, Mr. Hale," the union leader assured him, but as the group started to leave, Hewie Janders asked sharply, "How do we know that communist Rod Burke'll allow us to open the piers?"

"That's what we've been negotiating about, Mr. Janders," Goro replied. "When I reach an agreement with you men, the piers are open. That's what negotiation means."

When the delegation left�three Japanese, a haole and two Ffli-pinos�Hewlett Janders left his seat at the head of the table and said, "I cannot participate in what you men are about to do."

"I appreciate your position," Hale said coldly. "But will you bind yourself to accept what we decide?" At this question everyone turned to stare at Janders. If he refused to accept, in the name of J & W, the principal plantation operators, no one knew what the eventuality might be, and it was just possible that he might be big enough to resist both the unions and his own associates. Desperately he was tempted to fight this out to a G6tterd2mmerung conclusion, but he was prevented from doing so by cautious words from the man who twenty years before had taken the leadership of The Fort from him. Hoxworth Hale said slowly, "Hewie, your family and mine have always loved these islands. We cannot stand by and see them suffer any further."

The big man looked in dismay at his leader and was about to reject the proposals, but Hale reasoned: "If we must live with labor, and that seems to be the spirit of the times, let's do so with a certain grace. I'm going to call Sakagawa back and make the best..."

"I do not wish to be present," Janders said abruptly. He started to leave the room by the back door, but paused to warn his associates: "You're turning these islands over to the communists. I refuse to watch a Japanese field hand come stomping into my, office to lay down . . ."

"But you will consider yourself bound by our decision?" Hale interrupted.

"Yes," Janders snapped grudgingly, and when Goro returned to ratify the mutual surrender, Hewlett Janders was not there.

When the great strike ended, three of Hale's plantation managers, men senior to himself, quit with these words: "We been doin'

T

THE GOLDEN MEN 835

things our own way too long to be told by a bunch of slant-eyed Japs how to raise sugar." Younger men stepped forward to take their places�and it was a rueful moment when Hale discovered that he did not even know two of the replacements�and before the year ended, the new overseers were reporting: "We can work with the new system. Looks like we'll make more sugar than before." Hewie Janders snorted: "Something is eroding the character of America when young men are so eager to compromise with evil."