Hawaii - James Michener [445]
In the year that the great scholar died, crowded with honors, the young member of the family who was to become the radical was graduating from Punahou. He was Hoxworth Hale, in all outward respects a typical sixteen-year-old boy. He was neither tall nor short, fat nor thin. His hair was not black nor was it blond, and his eyes displayed no single prominent color. He was not at the top of his class nor yet at the bottom, and he was outstanding in no one scholastic accomplishment. He had played games moderately well but had never won fist fights against boys larger than himself.
Young Hoxworth Hale, named after the noted scholar, was most noted for the fact that he had uncommonly pretty sisters, Henrietta and Jerusha, and they lent him a spurious popularity which he would not otherwise have enjoyed. There was a good deal of chivvying to see which of his friends would win the favors of the charming sisters, and of course in later years his younger sister became engaged to one of her calabash cousins, a Whipple, whereupon Hoxworth's father told the family, "I think it's high time somebody married a stranger. Get some new blood into this tired old tree." His words were not taken in good grace, because he had married his cousin, a Hoxworth girl, and it was felt that he was casting aspersions upon her; nevertheless, when his oldest daughter began displaying outward tendencies and actually became engaged to a man named Gage from Philadelphia, he expressed his pleasure. But later Henrietta met a boy from New Hampshire named Bromley and the two discovered that way, way back her great-great-great-great-grandfather Charles Bromley and his great-great-great . . . well, anyway, she felt a lot more congenial with Bromley than she ever had with her fiance Gage, so she married the former because, as she pointed out, "he seems more like one of the family."
When young Hoxworth Hale left Punahou it was understood that he would go on to Yale, and in New Haven this undistinguished youth was to explode into a prominence no one had anticipated. Not having wasted his limited intellectual reserves in preparatory school, he was ready to blossom in college and gradually became both a scholar and a polished gentleman. In his grades he did markedly better than boys who had surpassed him at Punahou, while in sports he captained the polo team and served as assistant manager of the basketball team. He acquired the lesser amenities and in politics ran successfully for president of his class.
It was this unlikely youth who became the radical. His commitment began one day in his junior year when a Professor Albers from Leipzig was ending a lecture on the theory of imperialism with this shrewd observation: "The Congregational-Church-cum-Boston-merchant invasion and capture of Hawaii is the exact counterpart of the Catholic-Church-cum-Paris-entrepreneur rape of Tahiti. The proof of this analogy lies, I think, in the demonstrated manner whereby the missionaries who went to Hawaii, though they did not call in the American gunboats as did their French cousins in Tahiti, nevertheless, by revolutionary means, stole the land from the Hawaiians and wound up possessors of the islands."
Professor Albers' class contained, in addition to young Hoxworth Hale, his calabash cousin Hewlett Janders, two Whipples and a Hewlett, but these other descendants of the missionaries were content to stare in embarrassment at their arm rests. Not so Hoxworth; he coughed once, coughed twice, then boldly interrupted: "Professor Albers, I'm sorry but I'm afraid