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58 Chapter FIve with Justice for All In its colonial condition, the Territory of Hawaii was more readily manipulated by the white elite and the Big Five corporations. The political culture was mostly top-down. With statehood, political power in Hawaii shifted to new hands. Statehood invigorated the electoral process at a time when the power of the unions and the ILWU in particular was at its peak. The question was, how was this power to be used? What was the union movement to do with its new connections in high places? Was political power an absolute thing or did it function in a dynamic relationship to the quality of ideas and the care put into advancing them? In response to the challenge of actually translating union political power into public policy, Ed Nakamura was to perform his most important work. The ILWU had both a social vision and the political means to pursue it. As a result, the possibilities of reshaping public policy played a central role in the union’s life. As the 1950s passed, Nakamura became more involved in this process, and in 1959, in the year of statehood, at age thirty-seven, eight years into his practice of law, he became the primary legislative counsel of the ILWU.1 The University of Chicago had prepared him to think about the social and economic context of laws. As Karleen Chinen of the Hawaii Herald wrote in describing Nakamura, “The University of Chicago law program was based on the premise that in order to understand American law, one had to first understand the economy and then study the kinds of laws that reinforce that economic system.”2 Nakamura’s first written advice to the union on policy matters was a modest effort dated May 1, 1954. It was a memorandum on the movement in and out of the United States of ILWU members who were with Justice for all 59 Filipino immigrants. The memo addressed how these members could make problem-free visits to the Philippines and also what they should do if they wished to resettle in their homeland. The memo was devoid of legalese and was signed “Ed.” The ILWU social worker Ah Quon McElrath, whose history with the union reached back to its beginnings in Hawaii, believed that the union’s expectations of a lawyer had been shaped by the West Coast leader Harry Bridges. She paraphrased Bridges’ attitude as, “We hire lawyers to tell us what we can do under the law, and if we land in jail it’s their job to get us out.” Harriet Bouslog’s activism—her public speeches, her attacks on the Territory’s unlawful assembly law—had resulted in a politically kindred relationship between the union and its attorneys. Similarly, her partner Symonds, writing in the mid-1950s, created a sense of union solidarity by writing memos that referred to people by their nicknames: “Sabu” for Saburo Fujisaki and “Yama” for Mamoru Yamasaki. An aggrieved member, Santos Tadeo, was Brother Santos, and Symonds typically signed off with “Fraternally Yours.” In contrast, Nakamura appeared less eager to be at one with his clients, but neither was he formal. He was dealing with highly experienced union leaders and he sat at their table because of his legal expertise . In the realm of legislative policy-making beginning in 1959, his job was to know the law and make recommendations as to how the union might change it. In significant part because of brilliant work by Jack Hall, the union had scored a singularly transformational legislative victory in 1946 with passage of a Little Wagner Act, a version of the federal collective bargaining law. This act extended union recognition and collective bargaining to agricultural workers, the largest labor force in Hawaii. As we have seen, the union’s victory in the 1946 election later was diminished by the Red smear, and the union’s attempt to take over the Democratic Party in 1948 ended in a melodramatic failure. The repeated anti-communist blows that culminated in the Smith Act trials created bitterness and a sense of suspicion inside the ILWU. The union’s 1949 political action program provided measures of how far the union was from its goals. According to a union analysis, over ninety percent of the Territory’s tax revenues were derived from regressive taxes, meaning taxes that were not based on a person’s ability to pay. In the face of this, the union set a goal of raising...

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