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Chapter 7 The Island Democratic Party
- University of Hawai'i Press
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Chapter 7 The Island Democratic Party The story of Burns’ formative years has a striking parallel to the story of Hawai‘i in the first half of the twentieth century: It is wrapped in vague generalizations that present a mythic outline but conceal a great deal of pain. Burns was the oldest of four children born to Harry Jacob Burns and Anne Scally Burns, a military family whose lives were shaped by how America came to be a Pacific power. Harry was a veteran of the Spanish-American War, as were two of his brothers-in-law, Jack and Elmer Scally. John Burns was born in 1909 at a remote army fort, Fort Assineboine, Montana, only a generation after the closing of the American frontier. Harry Burns had been reassigned to the Pacific, not knowing whether he was to be stationed in Hawai‘i or the Philippines. From Hawai‘i, Harry sent a picture of himself on an all-star baseball team that Burns would keep his entire life. Burns thought of his father as a fine barroom fighter. Harry was such a good rifleman that he was once part of a national army rifle team. After Harry clarified that he would have a long-term assignment in Hawai‘i, he moved his family to Fort Shafter, O‘ahu. The way other people remember birthdays, Jack Burns remembered his date of arrival, May 30, 1913. He was four years old. Queen Lili‘uokalani was to live another four years and Sanford Dole another thirteen years. Initially the Burns family was billeted at Shafter in a tent with a wooden floor, then rented a house in the nearby neighborhood of Kalihi. While the Hawai‘i of Burns’ childhood had only a fifth of today’s population , it was growing rapidly and had a startling number of children. In the census of 1920, 40 percent of the people were under the age of fourteen. His sense of intimacy with local people was derived from close proximity . He lived across the street from an Auntie Josephine Maunakea. Burns’ mother became a godmother of the Kupau children. When Filipino workers 136 went on strike, they set up a camp across the street and cooked their meals on an open fire. Burns’ mother took them food. The Portuguese, who shared the Burns’ devout Catholicism, lived up Kalihi Valley. Two Japanese appear in his childhood stories, both storekeepers. “Our Kalihi,” as Burns called it, was on the west side of Kalihi Stream near Fern Park, which was named for the first Hawaiian mayor of Honolulu. As a boy Burns listened to Prince Jonah Kuhio speak at a rally in the park, in one of Kuhio’s ten successful campaigns for the office of delegate to Congress . When Burns’ family temporarily relocated across town, he ran away from school to Waikiki Beach, passing the shacks of native Hawaiians. They called out to him, “E komo mai, haole” (come in, foreign boy). Why was he not in school? Young Jack would sit and talk, eating their fish and poi. In 1990, fifteen years after his death, Burns’ daughter, Dr. Sheenagh Burns, a psychologist, published an article in The Hawaiian Journal of History that addressed the psychology of her family. It was studiously ignored, perhaps reflecting the lethargy of the public media, but perhaps also reflecting the extent to which Burns had been elevated to the realm of mythology. Her orphaned piece described Harry Burns as dashingly handsome, intelligent, and fun-loving. He could have captured any number of beautiful girls but instead chose Anne, a plain, deeply religious woman who Burns would come to describe as a saint. Sheenagh’s interpretation of Harry’s behavior echoed Jack’s: “The rigors of family life with four young children soon proved to be too much for Harry.” He became “more irresponsible” and at times abusive . Jack Burns said Harry “liked to gaddy and party,” while his mother did not. Harry was let out of the army,1 lost one civilian job, then another. Then he announced he was going to the West Coast to find work. When he did, the family was to join him. After being hired by a munitions plant, he wrote that he was planning to send money, which was the last Jack Burns—at age ten—heard from him. Remarkably, Anne Scalley Burns never retreated to the support of her family on the U.S. mainland. At first she washed diapers for Tripler Army Hospital, and...