John A. Burns

13. First Term

T·H·I·R·T·E·E·N First Term LAND REFORM WAS THE hottest issue of the 1963 legislative session. Lawmakers considered three different measures, before the Democratic majority finally settled on the Maryland Land Bill.The Maryland Land Bill took into account that most homeowners in Hawaii lived on leased land—people owned the improvements on the land, but not the land itself . This unique form of home ownership went back to the time of the Great Mahele of 1848, the division of land in Hawaii which created private property in the Western sense. Tragically, the division resulted in the transfer of most of the land into the hands of a very few people or entities. As Lawrence Fuchs pointed out: In 1959, the new state government owned 32 percent of all the land in Hawaii; the federal government nearly 8 percent; the Hawaiian Homes Commission 2.5 percent; and twelve private landholders owned 30 percent. . . .The biggest private owner was a charitable trust, the Bishop estate, whose 363,000 acres was more than the area possessed by the next two largest owners combined, Richard S. Smart, owner of the huge Parker Ranch on the Big Island, and the Damon estate. In all, twelve large private landholders—actually only eleven, since the Robinson family owned two estates—controlled 52 percent of all the private lands in Hawaii in the year of statehood. . . . The Bishop and Campbell estates owned 40 percent of the private land on Oahu, and over one-fourth of the entire island. The Maryland Land Bill required large landowners who leased land to homeowners in Hawaii to agree to sell the land to the homeowner at “fair market value,” providing the home had been owned for at least five years. As appealing as this sounded, Governor Burns had withheld his 199 support of the legislation.The new governor was simply not prepared to take on the major owners of leased land—particularly the politically sensitive Bishop Estate, whose property represented the bulk of the endowment of the Kamehameha Schools. Burns also feared that the Maryland Land Bill posed a serious constitutional problem. If the Fourteenth Amendment extended the constitutional prohibition against impairment of the obligation of contract, it would have rendered the five-year holding period in the Maryland Land Bill unconstitutional. Thus, leasehold conversion would be applicable only at the end of the term of the lease, creating two classes of homeowners in Hawaii—those with leaseholds eligible for conversion and those that were not. The result would have been serious inequities in the housing market. While the Maryland Land Bill cruised through the house of representatives , it faced tougher going in the senate. Its two forceful Democratic opponents in the senate were described by George Cooper and Gavan Daws in their 1985 study, Land and Power in Hawaii: One of these was Harry M. Field from Maui, a part-Hawaiian sympathetic to the Bishop Estate, a major lessor whose lands amounted to a kind of surviving Hawaiian patrimony. The other was Mitsuyuki Kido, the senator-developer who, in 1959, had supported a bill to raise the pay of Bishop Estate trustees at the same time he was negotiating a co-venture with the Estate to develop 520 acres of its land in Heeia, Oahu. With ten Republicans and two Democrats against the Maryland Land Bill, it fell to Senator George Ariyoshi to break a 12 to 12 deadlock. Ariyoshi had hesitated to commit himself earlier, but he finally voted against the bill for constitutional reasons. In his 1997 biography, With Obligation to All, Ariyoshi described the reaction to his tie-breaking vote: The criticism was thunderous. I had to wonder if my career in politics was over. In the process, I learned that Governor Burns actually agreed with my vote. He called and said he was pleased to see me take the position I had. He said it required courage to stand up for what I felt strongly about, and furthermore that I had saved him the trouble of vetoing the bill. In their opposition to the Maryland Bill, Republican Senators Yasutaka Fukushima and William “Doc” Hill sounded like 1990s advo200 The Making of a Consensus cates of Hawaiian sovereignty. Fukushima told his senate colleagues, “I was brought up in an atmosphere that the lands of the Hawaiians should belong to the indigenous group.” Hill sounded even more emphatic: “It would be...