A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [32]
Hawaii in the summer of 1960 bore little resemblance to El Dorado, Ponca City, or any other place the Dunham family had roosted. As a state, it was an infant, admitted to the union on August 21, 1959. The population of the entire archipelago, 2,400 miles out in the Pacific, was fewer than 650,000. Whites made up less than a third of the population and were outnumbered by Japanese-Americans. Nearly one in five people was Hawaiian or part Hawaiian. There were Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, and nearly 13,000 “other,” though less than one-tenth of one percent of the population was classified as Negro. The place prided itself on tolerance. Despite the occasional real estate listing insisting on “no haoles,” or white people, or calls for “Americans of Japanese ancestry only,” residents saw Hawaii as a laboratory for assimilation and a model of harmonious coexistence. Steeped in its vision of pluralism, the state seemed poised at a moment of infinite possibility.
Hawaii was on the verge of economic liftoff, too. Jet travel had sliced hours off the time required to cross the Pacific. Visitor expenditures had risen fivefold between 1950 and 1960, outstripping the value of sugar and pineapple production for the first time. The total value of mortgages had quadrupled, and bank branches had more than doubled in number. By 1967, Honolulu would rank fifth in the country in the value of building permits issued, trailing only New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago. Paradise of the Pacific—a glossy magazine featuring articles on outrigger canoe racing, the muumuu, and Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimming champion who popularized surfing—was thick with ads for real estate companies, banks, moving and storage services, decorators, flooring. For a footsore furniture salesman with an industrious banker wife and a college-age daughter, Hawaii had promise. With tuition at the University of Hawai‘i at eighty-five dollars per semester, enrollment in the fall of 1960 jumped by thirteen percent. For the first time, the number of incoming freshman topped two thousand, Stanley Ann Dunham among them. Arriving on campus in September 1960, she swiftly jettisoned her first name. From then on, Stanley was Ann.
At first glance, the University of Hawai‘i in 1960 might have seemed an unlikely fit for a brainy nonconformist with a wry sense of humor and a taste for cool jazz. It was a quiet provincial land-grant college nestled in the tropical lushness of the Mānoa Valley, east of downtown Honolulu and at the base of the Ko‘olau Range. The valley was known for its rainbows, produced when the trade winds coming across the windward shore of O‘ahu hit the mountains, sprinkling the valley on the far side in showers. The student newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawai‘i, occupied itself with documenting every beauty contest, sorority pledge week, and race for homecoming queen. Its monthly calendar featured a spread of a comely coed, dressed in something tropical but demure. (“A water sports enthusiast, she likes swimming, surfing and water skiing. Another one of her interests is that of hula dancing.”) In the home economics department, the course offerings included “Aesthetics of Clothing and Personal Appearance.” The annual, student-sponsored Ka Palapala Beauty Pageant of Nations, with its bathing-suit rally and formal-dress competition, selected seven finalists, one for each of seven ethnic groups. “The University of Hawai‘i used to be a good party school,” Pake Zane, a Chinese-American born on Maui and an undergraduate in the late 1950s, told me. “We had our share of demonstrations, but it was basically much more conservative. People would say, ‘Don’t go make trouble.’ It’s a kind of Oriental attitude—that you don’t want to bring shame on your family.” There were exceptions to that rule, of course. When James Meredith was barred from entering the University of Mississippi in September 1962 on the basis of his race, five hundred students and faculty members on the Mānoa campus held a rally