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195 chapter 11 Racism—and Reaction “We do not just have a cyclical depression in Hawaii that will one day crawl up the graphs of the professional economists to the peaks of prosperity.” Such were the ominous words of Jack Hall, just after the monumental strike of stevedores had concluded. No, he insisted, “Hawaii has reached the stage of chronic unemployment—chronic unemployment of an alarming degree.” The island paradise was “already worse off than any state in the union,” with the “prospect of one worker in four being without a job.” The vaunted sugar industry was slated to produce in 1949 nearly one million tons of sugar with a workforce of less than 20,000 hourly paid workers; to produce the same tonnage in 1932 had required a workforce of 54,992. Yet, astonishingly, during those same years the permanent population of Hawai‘i increased by 150,000.1 There were contrary trends. Ray Coll felt that the stevedores’ strike would help island farmers, given that it blocked competition from the mainland because fewer ships were making the journey due to inability to unload upon arrival. In Waimea, for example, early on he noticed that farmers who had been plowing under lettuce because the Honolulu market was glutted were—with the strike—able to both increase output and sell it.2 Yet this did not obliterate the realities perceived by Hall. Drawn by the advertisements of Hawai‘i as an earthly paradise, the impressions rendered by visiting soldiers and sailors, and a long-standing tradition of seeing the archipelago as worthy of residence, migrants from the mainland had been traveling westward particularly since the end of the war. Their taking up permanent residence in Hawai‘i had placed pressure on employment rolls. More than this, the changing population and economic climate placed added strain on the exceedingly intricate racial makeup of Hawai‘i, which—in turn—created the opportunity for management to pit one group against another. This increased racial diversity was taking root as the United States itself was moving to the right, driven by war in Korea and the purging of Reds from public life. As these migrants who made up this enhanced reserve army of labor increased in number, ready to be deployed against unions—as management 196 Chapter 11 saw it—unions responded accordingly. By early August 1950 a local periodical complained that there had been 18 work stoppages already—with more planned. Worse, said this writer, in each instance the ILWU was the bargaining agent of the employees involved. “No other union has engaged in a strike so far this year,” it was announced prematurely.3 By December the same journal was complaining of an AFL bus strike in Honolulu in terms that echoed what had been heard when the stevedores walked out.4 The bus strike led to an astronomical intensification of traffic congestion, with vehicles ensnarled bumper to bumper and with prospects for further chaos.5 One frustrated journal posed what had been thought unimaginable: “Should government control the buses?”6 Worse—or so it was thought—was that this problem could not be blamed on the ILWU, as it was Art Rutledge’s AFL-affiliated union that was responsible.7 Rutledge’s AFL had a membership of about 10,000 in Hawai‘i, although only half of this number were organized in private industry. The remainder were union members employed at the Navy Yard at Pearl Harbor.8 These numbers were far from negligible but paled in comparison to the ILWU’s figures, thus highlighting the latter’s potency. But there were other changes in the makeup of Hawai‘i that had attracted the attention of Hall’s antagonists. Oscar Iden told his employer, Senator Butler, that he should “compare the ‘curves’ of Negro and white births and deaths in some of the southern states where the present Negro population is close to a majority.” He noted nervously, “When the Negro electorate does reach a majority in a few short years, may we not expect a few, and possibly radical black Senators[?] Isn’t is probable that under such circumstances, there would be a ‘block’ of the Hawaiian and Negro Senators[?]”9 As it turns out, Iden’s worries were wildly overblown, but this nervousness was driven to no small degree by the specter of white supremacy’s retreat in the face of the Pacific War and the concomitant surge toward equality by all those not defined as “white”—a reality...

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