Hawaii - James Michener [449]
"This is a scandal!" Hoxworth cried, and to his amazement he found himself deeply involved in art problems, and now when he passed through the Jarves collection, he thought: "These marvelous masterworks!" He wrote a long letter to the college paper, asking why a college with Yale's background should have conspired at such a nasty business, and hell broke loose.
Hoxworth was defamed on the Yale campus as a radical who had raped the reputation of his own college; but a Boston art critic wrote: "The general outline of the facts so patiently developed by young Mr. Hale have long been known in art circles but hitherto they have not been publicly aired, out of courtesy to a revered institution whose deportment Otherwise has been above reproach." So once more one of the most essentially conservative young men Hawaii ever sent to Yale found himself the center of controversy, and this one far exceeded in general interest his spirited defense of the missionaries, for it involved the honor of the university itself.
At the height of the controversy the campus newspaper evolved a logical way for Hoxworth to apologize, but just as he had refused to accommodate himself to Professor Albers' erroneous data on Hawaii, so he now refused to condone what Yale had done to his favorite Hawaiian editor, James Jackson Jarves. Yale had stolen the pictures, and Hoxworth bluntly reiterated his charges. And then late one afternoon as he walked disconsolately through the collection a completely new thought came to him: "It really doesn't matter to Jarves now whether Yale stole the pictures or not, just as it doesn't matter whether the missionaries stole the land or not. What counts, and the only thing that counts is this: What good did the institution accomplish? If Yale had not picked up the pictures, forcibly perhaps, where would they be now? Could they possibly have served the wonderful purposes they serve here in New Haven? If the missionaries had stepped aside and allowed Hawaii to drift from one degeneracy to another, what good would have been accomplished? Yale is better by far for having had such a solid beginning for its art school, and Hawaii is better for having had the missionaries. The minor blemishes on the record are unimportant. It doesn't matter what an arrogant fool like Albers says. Janders and the rest were right to ignore him. The fact is that in Hawaii today there are sugar plantations, and pineapple, and deep reservoirs and a lot of different people living together reasonably well. If Yale stole the pictures, they're entitled to them because of the good use to which they put them. And I'm not going to argue with anyone any more about the missionaries stealing Hawaii. If they did, which I don't admit, they certainly put what they stole to good purposes." He saw then, that gloomy afternoon when he was being hammered by his friends, that there were many ways to judge the acts of an institution, and the pragmatic way was not the worst, by any means.
Thus he started his education, that marvelous, growing, aching process whereby a mind develops into a usable instrument with a collection of proved experience from which to function, and he was suddenly tired of Yale, and Punahou men, and professors trained at Leipzig, and problems relating to James Jackson Jarves. Consequently, he walked casually out of the gallery, nodded a grave farewell to the pictures he would never bother to see again, and reported to the New Haven post office where, on April 28, 1917, he enlisted in the army and went to France.
ON AUGUST 19, 1916, an event occurred which was to change the history of Hawaii, but as in the case of most such