December 16, 2024: Fall Semester Reflections: 20C Af Am Lit

[I think we could all use some reminders these days of the best of our communities and conversations. So for this year’s Fall Semester reflections series, I wanted to share one moment from each of my classes that embodied those collective goals. I’d love to hear about your Falls in comments!]

I’m going to start this series by breaking my own stated rules slightly, but I think you’ll agree that this counts as an inspiring moment, if one that we had to pay off every day thereafter. At the first class meeting of my 20^th Century African American Literature course, I made a request for the first and so far only time in my career: I asked them to stay off of their phones as much as possible (recognizing that life happens and it’s sometimes necessary) in the course of our semester and discussions. We were gonna be talking about some consistently challenging and often fraught and painful texts and topics, and I wanted us to be in it together as much as we could. I was so proud of how much we honored that request, and how fully we did stay in our collective space and conversations, leading to some of my favorite discussions and days in any class in my 20 years at FSU. I won’t make this request too often, I don’t imagine, but I’ll know that I can if and when it feels right, and as with everything I know our FSU students will rise to the challenge.

Next reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whattaya got?

December 14-15, 2024: Hawaii in American Culture

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to this special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

1)      James Michener’s Hawaii (1959): I wrote a bit about Michener’s first truly epic historical novel in that post, and would stand by my two assertions there: that his works are more period fiction than true historical fiction (in my definitions of the true concepts); but that their multi-period focus allows for groundbreaking and important depictions of his chosen communities nonetheless. I haven’t read Hawaiii in decades, but that’s my sense of this book too, making it a cultural representation well worth returning to nearly 70 years later.

2)      Blue Hawaii (1961): I haven’t seen the first of what would be three Elvis Presley films shot in Hawaii in a five-year period (a list that also includes 1962’s Girls! Girls! Girls! and 1965’s Paradise, Hawaiian Style), and I very much doubt it is likewise worth returning to in late 2024. And I think that’s actually an analytical point—from what I can tell, these films were much more of an excuse for the singer and friends to visit the islands than compelling stories that needed the Hawaiian setting. If so, that helped establish a trend which has unquestionably continued ever since (50 First Dates, anyone?).

3)      Hawaii Five-O (1968-1980): On the other hand, I don’t want to suggest that every cultural work set in Hawaii chooses that setting for such non-specific (or at least non-artistic) reasons; some, like this groundbreaking and popular police procedural TV show, absolutely do connect to specific aspects of the islands and their communities, cultures, and contexts. For example, two of the original four officers on whom the show focused were non-white, a striking percentage in a late 1960s program: Chin Ho Kelly, portrayed by Chinese American actor Kam Fong Chun (an 18-year veteran of the Honolulu Police Department); and Kono Kalakaua, portrayed by native Hawaiian actor Zulu. That’s the Hawaii I know, and I love that this popular show portrayed it as such.

4)      “Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World” (1990): If you’ve been to a wedding in the last three decades, you’ve heard this ukelele-driven cover of two already-beautiful songs made even more beautiful by native Hawaiian singer Israel “IZ” Ka’ano’i Kamakawiwo’ole. That beauty, combined with the very unique song of IZ’s ukelele and voice alike, certainly explains the staying power of this combinatory cover song. But I really love its representation of a cross-cultural America, with two songs from Jewish American songwriting duos, the second made famous by an African American jazz trumpeter and singer, given new life and meaning by a native Hawaiian performer.

5)      Blue Crush (2002): I can’t talk about cultural representations of Hawaii without getting surfing in there somewhere, and of the surfing films I know, Blue Crush is one of the most overtly concerned with aspects of Hawaiian culture and community (including the presence of a romantic lead who is in town for the NFL Pro Bowl, which was hosted there for many years). On the other hand, its main character is a very, very blond young woman (played by Kate Bosworth), and its more ethnic characters are relegated to supporting roles; that says more about Hollywood in 2002 than it does about Hawaii, but it’s a reflection of the continued work we need to do in how we represent this hugely diverse place.

End of semester series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 13, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: The Varsity Victory Volunteers

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

On a post-Pearl Harbor group who embody the best of the war, Hawai’i, and America.

I learned a great deal while researching and writing my fifth book, We the People: The 500-Year Battle Over Who is American (2019). I had a general sense of the exclusionary and inclusive histories I wanted to highlight in each chapter, having talked about most of them in a number of settings over the last couple years; but in the course of working on each chapter I discovered new histories related to those central threads, stories that surprised me yet also and especially exemplified my topics and themes. So it went with Chapter 7: Everything Japanese Internment Got Wrong: I knew that I wanted to focus in that chapter on Japanese American World War II soldiers as a central, inclusive challenge to the exclusionary histories and narratives of the internment policy and camps; but it was only when researching those respective World War II communities further that I learned about the amazing, inspiring, foundational story of the Varsity Victory Volunteers (VVV).

There were quite simply too many Japanese Americans in Hawai’i (and they were too integral to the community’s economy and society) for internment camps to be possible. But the island featured its own forms of World War II anti-Japanese discrimination to be sure, and it was out of one such discriminatory moment that the VVV was born. The day of the Pearl Harbor attacks, all of the island’s ROTC students were called up for active duty as the newly constituted Hawaii Territorial Guard (HTG). But when federal officials learned that Japanese American students were among those numbers, they dismissed those students from service, deeming them 4C (“enemy aliens”) and thus ineligible to serve. Frustrated by this treatment, many of the students met with Hung Wai Ching, a Chinese Hawaiian community leader who had become an ally to the group. On his advice they drafted a letter to the territory’s military governor, Delos Emmons, which read in part: “We joined the Guard voluntarily with the hope that this was one way to serve our country in her time of need. Needless to say, we were deeply disappointed when we were told that our services in the Guard were no longer needed. Hawaii is our home; the United States, our country. We know but one loyalty and that is to the Stars and Stripes. We wish to do our part as loyal Americans in every way possible and we hereby offer ourselves for whatever service you may see fit to use us.”

Emmons accepted the VVV’s offer, and in February 1942 they were constituted as a labor battalion (attached to the 34^th Combat Engineers) and assigned to Schofield Barracks. Over the next year they would contribute both their labor and their presence to the community there, becoming such an integral part of its operations and society that when Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy visited in December 1942 (escorted by none other than Hung Wai Ching), he was struck by the VVV in particular. Not at all coincidentally, in January 1943 the War Department reversed its policy and allowed Japanese Americans to serve in the armed forces; the VVV requested permission to disband so they could volunteer, and nearly all of the VVV members ended up in the 442^nd Regimental Combat Team, the all-Japanese unit that would become the most decorated in American military history. I knew about the 442^nd before I wrote the chapter and book, but I had never heard of the VVV—and I know of few stories that exemplify the best of American military, social, and cultural history more fully than does this post-Pearl Harbor, volunteer Japanese American student community.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 12, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: Pablo Manlapit

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

First, a couple paragraphs on the Filipino American labor leader from my book We the People:

“The concentration of many of these early-twentieth-century Filipino arrivals in western U.S. communities of migrant labor led to new forms of inspiring communal organization and activism, ones that also produced corresponding new forms of exclusionary prejudice. The story of Pablo Manlapit and the first Filipino Labor Union (FLU) is particularly striking on both those levels. Manlapit was eighteen when he immigrated from the Philippines to Hawaii in 1909, one of the nearly 120,000 Filipinos to arrive in Hawaii between 1900 and 1931; he worked for a few years on the Hamakua Mill Company’s sugarcane plantations, experiencing first-hand some of the discriminations and brutalities of that labor world. In 1912, he married a Hawaiian woman, Annie Kasby, and as they began a family he left the plantation world and began studying the law. By 1919, Manlapit had become a practicing labor lawyer, and he used his knowledge and connections to found the Filipino Labor Union on August 31, 1919; he was also elected the organization’s first president. The FLU would organize major strikes on Hawaiian plantations in both 1920 and 1924, as well as complementary campaigns such as the 1922 Filipino Higher Wage Movement; these efforts did lead to wage increases and other positive effects, but the 1924 strike also culminated in the infamous September 9 Hanapepe Massacre, when police attacked strikers, killing nine and wounding many more.

 

Manlapit was one of sixty Filipino activists arrested after the massacre; as a condition of his parole he was deported to California in an effort to cripple Hawaiian labor organizing, but Manlapit continued his efforts in California, and in 1932 returned to Hawaii and renewed his activism there, hoping to involve Japanese, indigenous, and other local labor communities alongside Filipino laborers. In 1935, Manlapit was permanently deported from Hawaii to the Philippines, ending his labor movement career and tragically separating him from his family, but his influence and legacy lived on, both in Hawaii and in California. In Hawaii, the Filipino American activist Antonio Fagel organized a new, similarly cross-ethnic union, the Vibora Luviminda; the group struck successfully for higher wages in 1937, and would become the inspiration for an even more sizeable and enduring 1940s Hawaiian labor union begun by Chinese American longshoreman Harry Kamoku and others. In California, a group of Filipino American labor leaders would, in 1933 in the Salinas Valley, create a second Filipino Labor Union (also known as the

FLU), immediately organizing a lettuce pickers’ strike that received national media attention and significantly expanded the Depression-era conversation over Filipino and migrant laborers. In 1940, the American Federation of Labor chartered the Filipino-led Federal Agricultural Laborers Union, cementing these decades of activism into a formal and enduring labor organization.”

Just a quick addendum: there are many, many reasons to better remember Asian American figures and histories like Manlapit and the FLU. But high on the list is the way in which those stories and histories complicate, challenge, and change our broader narratives of topics like work, organized labor, and protest and social movements in America. Every one of those themes has been as diverse and multi-cultural as America itself, throughout our history just as much as in the present moment; and every one has included Asian Americans in all sorts of compelling and crucial ways.

Last Hawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 11, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: Annexation

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

A quarter-century after the United States welcomed King Kalākaua with such respect, the federal government treated another Hawaiian monarch, one who had served as Queen Regent during his subsequent 1881 world tour, with utter disrespect. I’ve written at length about the violent overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani and the subsequent annexation of Hawaii in two pieces, this one for We’re History and this one for my Saturday Evening Post Considering History column. So in lieu of a full post today, I’ll ask you to check out those two interconnected and complementary pieces, and to help us better remember this pivotal and painful moment in Hawaiian and American history.  

Next Hawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 10, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: King Kalākaua’s Visit

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

On three striking moments in the state visit beyond the time in DC (on which check out that piece and this one, among much other coverage).

1)      San Francisco: A significant layer to my recently completed podcast was the story of San Francisco in the 1870s (and into the September 1881 moment in which the Celestials played their last game). This was the city with the nation’s oldest and largest Chinatown community, and also the city that became the violent epicenter of the period’s anti-Chinese American movement; obviously those two facts are related, but they also reflect the true duality of a community that both embodied and challenged our foundational diversity throughout this decade. Which makes it pretty interesting to think about King Kalākaua’s celebratory week in the city in late November and early December 1874. To quote one telling response, from the Black newspaper Pacific Appeal, “there has either been a sudden abandonment of colorphobia prejudice, or an extraordinary amount of toadyism to a crown head by the San Francisco American people.”

2)      Transcontinental Train Trip: On December 5^th, the King and his traveling party boarded a train for the weeklong journey across the continent to Washington. They would make extended stops along the way at such significant Western and Midwestern American communities as Cheyenne (in what was then Wyoming Territory), Omaha, and Chicago. But it’s the trip itself that interests me most here—this was just five years after the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad (with the famous 1869 Golden Spike Ceremony), and thus still quite early in the histories both of this way of traversing the nation and of the concept of a more genuinely interconnected nation and continent at all. Changes which contributed to the so-called “closing of the frontier,” and which likewise can be directly connected to the need for further expansion which prompted, among countless other things, the annexation of Hawaii 25 years after the King’s visit (on which more in tomorrow’s post).   

3)      New Bedford: That was all still ahead in the nation’s Transpacific future in 1874; but toward the end of his time in the US, the King also visited a city that was absolutely essential to the nation’s Transatlantic past. That city was New Bedford, Massachusetts, center of the whaling industry for well more than a century and also profoundly interconnected with the histories of American slavery, among other defining origin points and communities. Among the many compelling details of the King’s visit to New Bedford on New Year’s Day, 1875, my favorite for all those reasons has to be the epic dinner hosted by Mayor George Richmond and featuring 100 master mariners from the community (with each and every one of whom the King shook hands at the dinner’s end). Ain’t that America?

Next Hawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?

December 9, 2024: Hawaiian Histories: Three Shifts

[150 years ago this week, Hawaii’s King Kalākaua arrived in Washington, DC for an extended series of events, a defining part of a more than two-month state visit to the US. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that visit and other Hawaiian histories, leading up to a special post on cultural representations of the islands.]

On three moments through which Hawaii’s history significantly shifted.

1)      1778-1779, Contacts: I was pretty tempted to order these three focal moments non-chronologically, as I really don’t want to reinforce the idea that contact with non-Hawaiians/Europeans was the most significant part of Hawaiian history. But with a full recognition that any individual choices for a post like this will be partial and reductive, and a hope that you all understand where I’m coming from, I decided to stick with chronology. And there’s no doubt that Captain James Cook’s controversial series of voyages to the islands in the late 1770s, the first known encounter between Europeans and Hawaiians, altered the histories of both this particular community and multiple nations (including Cook’s native Great Britain but also the new United States). Not to mention the effects on Cook, who was killed in February 1779 during a confrontation with Hawaiian leaders.

2)      1795, Kingdom: I don’t know nearly enough about the island’s histories to be able to say for sure whether this second shift was in any direct way related to that first one, but it seems likely that there’s some causality between the two events, that these encounters with outsiders pushed Hawaiian leaders to establish a more formal and forceful rule. There had of course been prominent native Hawaiian community leaders for centuries by this time, but it was in 1795 that the leader who came to be known as King Kamehameha I founded the House of Kamehameha, a royal dynasty that would reign over the islands for the next century. As anyone with a general knowledge of human history and/or human nature would expect, he didn’t unify the islands under his rule without multiple, extended conflicts, though—including a particularly significant, subsequent shift…

3)      1819, Conflicts over Kapu: Across much of those prior centuries of leadership, Hawaii had been a theocracy, governed by a set of religious and social rules known as kanawai. More exactly, these rules outlawed various practices, known as kapu, a list of forbidden customs that included women eating alongside men. But in 1819, again likely influenced by the prior half-century of contacts and changes, King Kamehameha II publicly dined with two royal women, including his mother Queen Keopuolani. The controversial moment ignited an extended civil conflict that ended with both a reinforcement of the dynasty’s rule and with a newfound sense of Hawaiian modernity—one that would directly connect to the royal outreach which inspired this week’s series and about which I’ll write tomorrow.

Next Hawaiian history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hawaiian histories or stories you’d highlight?