The Island Edge of America

Chapter 1 The Edge

Chapter 1 The Edge When the sun is high in the central Pacific, visitors often wander near downtown Honolulu along the mountain side of ‘Iolani Palace, past the iron fence, past the statue of the queen, and into the open-air rotunda of the capitol of the State of Hawai‘i. These landmarks say that Hawai‘i once was a kingdom, and now it is a state of the United States. If the visitor were to return for a long night of storytelling, he or she might acquire a more intense feeling for their significance, because in Hawai‘i there is a story for every niche, stream, stone, and passage. Through storytelling, a sense of the past lives, even as details are lost. There are many stories about the spirit of the last queen and about the dance of candlelight beneath the closed door of her upstairs room in the Palace, where she was imprisoned by her usurpers. A more recent story of the Palace is about its degenerate condition in the last days of the American territorial government, when rattling air conditioners hung from the arched windows and plywood partitions jutted from the Victorian porches. Members of the Territorial House huddled at tiny desks in the royal throne room, and senators met in the royal dining room. The appointed governor labored in the personal office of the monarch, and the territorial secretary held forth in the royal bedroom. With the approaching transformation to statehood, the people of Hawai‘i agreed on at least one thing: The need to build a new capitol. WHEN THE ARCHITECT John Carl Warnecke uttered the word symbol, the “s” whistled like a sharp wind through his imagined structures. Of all the designers who clamored for the commission, Warnecke likely won because of his passion for designing buildings that symbolized a time and place. In American society he was soon to become known as John F . Kennedy’s 1 favorite architect and then as the designer of the fallen president’s grave site, but when he was awarded the commission to design Hawai‘i’s new capitol he was not yet burdened by celebrity. He opened an office in Honolulu and immersed himself in what for him was a wonderful, new place. After studying the pre-Western society of Hawai‘i, he attempted to organize his design entirely around the rectangular stone platforms of the native Hawaiian temple . Failing to perfect that idea, he pursued a temple of another sort, a synthesis of the Hawaiian world with East and West. When the Democrat John A. Burns was elected governor of the State of Hawai‘i in 1962, Warnecke wondered if Burns would support the continuation of the capitol project. It was elaborate for a small state, and it had been started under a Republican administration. Burns was known for peering sternly at even the smallest budget items, but he had an expansive side. On the playing field, he had been the little boy who demanded the ball, and in his maturity he was driven by the idea that everything in Hawai‘i be first class. Warnecke told Burns that the new state needed a symbol the way Notre Dame needed a great football team, and with that he returned to his work. During the period that John F . Kennedy was calling his administration the New Frontier, the Burns regime in Honolulu was the New Hawai‘i. In ways that transcended slogans, the story of Hawai‘i seemed not merely to blend in with the evolution of American society but also to influence its development . When Kennedy visited, America was passing into its conflict over civil rights. Inspired by the multiracial community that he saw at work, Kennedy said, “Hawai‘i is what the United States is striving to be.” In 1961, Dr. Lawrence Fuchs published his widely read social and political history, titled Hawai‘i Pono, which means Hawai‘i the good or Hawai‘i the righteous. The people of Hawai‘i, he believed, “present the world’s best example of dynamic social democracy.”1 It was a utopian moment, in which policymakers talked seriously of curing the problems not only of race but of ignorance, poverty, disease, and oppression. If there was a party with a live band, someone was almost certain to belt out “Impossible Dream,” from Man of La Mancha. Not only Burns but many others spoke unselfconsciously of the dream of Hawai‘i. James Michener, who was peripherally involved with Burns...