Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory

Chapter 26. No Place to Honor This Man: Elemakule Pa and the Federal Hospital

313 26 No Place to Honor This Man Elemakule Pa and the Federal Hospital the u.s. census for 1910 indicates that Elemakule Pa was the “head” of the household of “patients” at the U.S. Leprosy Investigation Station, better known as the Federal Hospital, at Kalawao. His father, Haalipo Pa, had died at Kakaako Hospital, and he himself had worked for three years as an attendant for the people with leprosy that Dr. Milton Rice was permitted to treat privately in Hilo, on the Big Island.1 Admitted to the Federal Hospital in 1909, he was one of only nine individuals to ever agree to be treated at this state-of-the-art facility. Seven of the other volunteers were teenagers­ or young men: Louis Aloisa, Hapalau Awao, Emilio Brito, Iupeli Hoiwale, Kahawai Kaiehu, Keoni Keola, and William Rose. The final volunteer was Charles Roth, a fortyfour -year-old man from Switzerland who had come to Hawaii when he was about sixteen.2 In her book, Under the Cliffs of Molokai, Emma Warren Gibson described the failure­of the Federal Hospital: “One by one the volunteer patients left, not caring to take the treatments and preferring a freer life at Kalaupapa. . . . After all the expense and trouble of building and equipping these buildings, it was a sad blow that human­nature, as shown in the happy go-lucky Hawaiians, could make or break a humane project.” She said of the nine volunteers, “unused as they were to the restrictions of hospital life, they Elemakule Pa, age fifty-two, in a photo taken on July 1, 1907, the day he was sent to Kalaupapa. Adapted from photo, courtesy of Hawai‘i State Archives. No Place to HonorThis Man    315 had little liking for it and proved uncooperative. They rebelled against the rigor of the treatments and the confinement of living within the grounds.”3 In reality, the failure of the Federal Hospital at Kalawao had little to do with Elemakule Pa and the other eight volunteers. The whole process of building the Federal Hospital had been fraught with politics, poor judgment, a lack of cultural understanding, and the United States’ fervent hope that everyone with leprosy on the mainland could be sent to Hawaii. Although the presence of leprosy had been listed as the seventeenth objection to annexation,4 the U.S. government quickly looked to Hawaii following annexation for a solution to its problems related to leprosy. In 1899, a study authorized­by Congress identified 278 people with leprosy located in twenty-one different states, only 72 of whom were isolated.5 In 1901, William Haywood, an attorney in Washington , D.C., notified the Board of Health that the California Legislature had asked Congress to pass legislation that would send everyone with leprosy in the United States to Hawaii.6 In 1902, a Senate subcommittee composed of Senators John. H. Mitchell, Joseph­ R. Burton, Addison G. Foster, and Joseph C. S. Blackburn focused on the “vital question ” of whether the control of Kalaupapa should be transferred to the federal government .7 The subcommittee was shocked to hear testimony from territorial officials that “indiscriminate legitimate and illegitimate cohabitation is permitted in the settlement” and that some of these marriages resulted in the birth of children. Mr. McVeigh explained the difficulties faced by people who had been forced to leave their spouses at home: “There are a great many there who have formed connections that are unable to get a divorce from their husbands or wives. . . . We should have a divorce law which would permit these people to be allowed to marry again in the settlement.”8 To this, Senator Burton expressed his view that the sexes should be separated and asked, “Don’t you think it is better for 800 or 900 people to forego the elusive pleasures of cohabitation during their natural lives and pass away rather than to endanger the spread of this malady?” Burton suggested erecting a little enclosure on an acre of ground where a wife and husband could see each other at certain times and have “social intercourse.”9 Attorney General E. P. Dole expressed his belief that there was nowhere else on earth where people with leprosy were segregated as severely as they were in Hawaii. He noted, “I believe we have gone far enough. We have gone further than any other people. The claims of humanity would come in to prevent...