Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A coalition of forces in Hawaii resisted immense federal government pressure, includ-
ing from President Roosevelt, to carry out a mass internment of Japanese on the islands,
similar to what was being done on the US West Coast. Around 1250 people were un-
justly detained in internment camps on Oʻahu, but the majority of Hawaii's 160,000
Japanese citizens were spared incarceration - although they did suffer racial discrimina-
tion and deep suspicions about their loyalties.
In 1943, the federal government was persuaded to reverse itself and approve the form-
ation of an all-Japanese combat unit, the 100th Infantry Battalion. Thousands of
nisei
vo-
lunteers were sent, along with the all-Japanese 442nd Regimental Combat Team, to fight
in Europe, where they became two of the most decorated units in US military history. By
the war's end, Roosevelt proclaimed these soldiers were proof that 'Americanism is a
matter of the mind and heart,' not 'race or ancestry.' The 1950s would test this noble sen-
timent. Still, Hawaii's multiethnic society emerged from WWII severely strained but not
broken.
In
Strangers from a Different Shore
, Ronald Takaki tells the story of the USA's Asian im-
migrant communities, from Hawaii's plantation laborers to the effects of WWII on racial
discrimination and modern attitudes toward multiculturalism.
A Long, Bumpy Road to Statehood
The end of WWII brought Hawaii closer to the center stage of American culture and
politics. Three decades had already passed since Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaʻole,
Hawaii's first delegate to the US Congress, introduced a Hawaii statehood bill in 1919,
but it received a cool reception in Washington DC. Even after WWII, Hawaii was often
viewed as too much of a racial melting pot for many US politicians to support statehood.
After WWII and during the Cold War, Southern Democrats in particular raised the
specter that Hawaiian statehood would leave the US open not just to the 'Yellow Peril'
(embodied, as they saw it, by imperialist Japan) but to Chinese and Russian communist
infiltration through Hawaii's labor unions. Further, they feared that Hawaii would elect
Asian politicians who would seek to end racial segregation, then still legal in the US.
Conversely, proponents of statehood for Hawaii increasingly saw it as a necessary civil
rights step to prove that the US actually practiced 'equality for all.'
In the late 1950s, Alaska narrowly beat out Hawaii to be admitted as the 49th state.
With more than 90% of island residents voting for statehood, Hawaii finally became the
USA's 50th state on August 21, 1959. A few years later, surveying Hawaii's relative eth-
nic harmony, President John Kennedy pronounced, 'Hawaii is what the world is striving
to be.' In the 1960s, Hawaii's two Asian American senators - WWII veteran and
nisei
