Hawaii - James Michener [580]
Actually, when Hewlett Janders accused Goro Sakagawa of being a communist he was not far from the truth. When The Fort, in 1916, 1923, 1928, 1936, 1939 and 1946, refused point-blank even to discuss unionism and used every known device including force and subversion to block labor from attaining any of its legitimate ends, it made .normal unionization of the islands impossible. The hardhitting but completely American union organizers sent out from the mainland found that in Hawaii customary procedures got nowhere. Not even the vocabulary of unionism was understood, or acknowledged where it was understood, so that both The Fort and the Honolulu Mail invariably referred to any union activity as communism; as a result, over the course of years Hawaii developed its own rather strange definition for terms which on the mainland were understood and accepted as logical parts of modern industrial life. In brief, unionism was subversion.
There were also physical difficulties. Oftentimes mainland men whom the course of history proved to have been rather moderate labor organizers were refused entrance to the islands. If they tried to talk to plantation hands they were bodily thrown off the premises. If they tried to hire a headquarters hall, none was allowed them. They were intimidated, vilified, abused and harassed by charges of communism.
In obedience to Gresham's Law of social change, when the moderates were driven out, the radicals moved in, and from 1944 on, a group of ultra-tough labor men quietly penetrated the islands and among them were many communists, for they had seen from afar that the situation in Hawaii made it a likely spot for the flowering of the communist creed. Among the leaders was a hefty, ugly Irish Catholic from New York named Rod Burke, who had joined the Party in 1927 and who had steadily risen in its ranks until he had reached a position of eminence from which he could be trusted to lead a serious attack upon Hawaii. His first step was to marry a Baltimore Nisei, and this Japanese girl, already a communist, was to prove of great assistance to him in his grand design for capturing the islands.
For example, when Rod Burke met Goro Sakagawa, returning to Hawaii after his instructive labor experiences in Japan, Burke instantly spotted the capable young army captain as the kind of person he required for the unionization and subsequently the communization of Hawaii. So Burke said to his Japanese wife, "Get young Sakagawa lined up," and the dedicated Nisei girl succeeded in enlisting Goro not as a communist but as a labor organizer, and through him Burke conscripted other Japanese and Filipinos without confiding to them his membership in the Communist Party. In this way a solid-core labor movement was founded which in 1947 stood ready to confront The Fort and fight to the rugged, island-breaking end. In later years Goro Sakagawa often discussed these beginnings with his lawyer brother Shigeo, back from an honors degree at Harvard, and he allowed Shig to probe his motives and understandings as they existed in early 1947. "Did you know then that Rod Burke was a communist?" Shig asked.
"Well, I never knew for sure, but I guessed he was," Goro explained. "He never gave me any proof. But I recognized him as a tough-minded operator."
"If you had these suspicions, Goro, why were you willing to hook up with him?"
"I realized from experience that old-style methods would never break The Fort. We tried reasonable unionism and got nowhere. Burke knew how to apply power. That's the only thing The Fort understood."
"Did Burke ever try to sign you up in the Party?" "No, he figured he could use me and then dump me in favor of the dumber Japanese and Filipinos he did sign up in the Party," Goro explained.
"How did he select his men?"
"Well, he picked them up where he could. Started enlisting Japanese who didn't know too much . . . Filipinos too. But they were just for support. The real guts of the Party was Rod Burke and his wife."