The Filipino Piecemeal Sugar Strike of 1924–1925

3. A Hopeless, Irresponsible Strike

27 3 A Hopeless, Irresponsible Strike THE HAWAII SHINPO, most labor oriented of the Japanese papers, worried about the strife between Manlapit and Ligot and about the Filipinos’ tendency to strike without preparation. Filipino laborers move like lightning. Without any calculations or preparations, they declare strike, and fight the capitalists. They do not seem to be concerned whether they attain their objectives, or not. What they care most is to cripple or cause inconvenience to the capitalists temporarily or permanently.1 The Shinpo’s worries were well grounded. The strike was hopeless from the start.2 All the odds were against the strikers. As an existential act of rebellion against the restrictive, exploitative, often humiliating plantation way of life, the strike might be justified ; but not from a trade union viewpoint, in which a strike should be called only if there is a reasonable chance of success or if the workers’ backs are to the wall. To launch this strike, almost without preparation, was an act of irresponsibility for which Wright, with his wider experience and perspective, must bear part of the blame along with Manlapit and his associates. The High Wages Movement claimed 10,000 adherents. But this was only one-half of the Filipino sugar workers and onequarter of the whole adult male sugar work force.3 The Movement itself had accused the HSPA of overstaffing the plantations , and still a steady stream of immigrants was pouring in from the Philippines, each shipload available for assignment to the most threatened plantations.4 In 1920 the combined Fili- 28 THE FILIPINO PIECEMEAL SUGAR STRIKE pinos and Japanese had comprised the great majority of sugar workers, but in 1924 the Filipinos stood alone. They were joined only by a dozen Puerto Ricans at Honomu.5 The Japanese press showed clearly that the Japanese laborers, however sympathetic they might feel, had not the slightest intention of being drawn into a strike as they had been in 1920.6 The Japanese labor union units, which earlier might at least have collected contributions in a systematic way, were now defunct, and the few AFL locals were inactive and uninterested. Also, the pockets of nonstriking sugar workers were not bulging with phenomenally large bonuses as they had been in 1920. There was no special issue to catch public attention, as the contrast between low basic wages and high bonus payments had done in 1920; low wages and long hours being traditional on plantations, why should a parcel of Filipino agitators pick this time to challenge the established order of things? The union leadership was detested by many government officials, including judges. The tone was set by Governor Farrington , who imagined Japanese influence behind the strike.7 Only a single Hawaii County supervisor, A. M. Cabrinha, lifted his voice against the open use of governmental machinery to harass the strikers,8 and the maverick attorney general, John Albert Matthewman, showed an elementary regard for civil liberties . The English language press, except for W. K. Bassett’s short-lived daily Honolulu Times and Thomas McVeigh’s weekly The New Freedom, was hostile to the strike. No wonder that an observer from the Pacific coast, in Hawaii at the end of the strike, observed: In traveling all over the islands and visiting almost every plantation, village, town and city in Hawaii, I found only one man who expressed the least sympathy for the strikers. We asked almost every one we met regarding the strike: School teachers, ministers, lawyers, doctors, bankers and the man-on-the-street. They all reflected the attitude represented by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association: Namely , that the Filipino strike was worked up by outside agitators and that the Filipino laborers had no real grievance.9 The quotation exaggerates. There was some sympathy, at least in the early part of the strike, and mainly among the Japa- A Hopeless, Irresponsible Strike 29 nese laborers, who in several localities gave the strikers some financial support.10 In Hilo several doctors gave their services free to the strikers.11 Even in Honolulu there was enough sympathy to provoke emotional red-baiting by the Star-Bulletin.12 But what sympathy there may have been was unorganized and ineffective. Nor did the strike elicit support from the Philippine government and press. Leonard Wood, the most authoritarian of governor generals, praised Ligot and called Manlapit ‘a mere agitator,’ and the Manila Herald blamed the Hanapepe riot on...