Hawaii - James Michener [581]
"Where did that leave you?" Shig explored. "I figured just like Burke," Goro explained. "I figured I was smart enough to use him and then dump him."
"Must have been a very interesting period," Shig said wryly. "There were no illusions on either side," Goro confessed. "Funny thing is that my wife, Akemi, figured the Burkes out the first time she saw them. She'd come up against a lot of communists in Japan, and she spotted Mrs. Burke instantly. And I think Mrs. Burke spotted her, so nobody was fooled," Goro assured his brother.
"Did Burke sign up any really good men?" Shig asked.
"Well, most of the Japanese were dopes, pure and simple, but Hany Azechi was as able a man as we ever produced in the islands."
"Looking back on it, Goro, do you think the alliance was necessary?"
Goro had often thought about this, especially since he had known so intimately the moderate A.F. of L. men on General MacArthur's team, and he concluded: "If you remember the position taken by The Fort . . . that even a discussion of labor was communism . . . Hell, Shig, I've told you about the time I went in to see Hewlett Janders. He made me stand like a peasant with my cap in my hands. Abused me, ridiculed me. Shig, there was no alternative."
"None?" his brother asked.
"None. Hawaii could never have moved into the twentieth century until the power of The Fort was broken. I alone couldn't have done it. The A.F. of L. men I knew in Japan couldn't have done it. Only a gutter fighter like Rod Burke could have accomplished it."
So when Hewlett Janders announced to the Honolulu Mail that mainland communists were endeavoring to capture the islands, he was right. And when he charged that Japanese had joined the Party under Rod Burke's leadership, he was also correct. But when he said that the leader of the plantation part of the strike, Goro Sakagawa, was also a communist, he was not right, but in those tense years the hatred of labor was so great that a relatively minor error like that didn't really matter.
The strike was a brutal, senseless, tearing affair, and it frightened Hawaii as nothing previous had ever done, not even the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Rod Burke moved swiftly to tie up the waterfront so that not a single H & H ship entered Hawaii for five and one half starving, agonized months. The Fort retaliated by cutting credit, so that everyone in the islands felt the pinch.
Goro Sakagawa led his sugar-plantation workers out on strike. The Fort retaliated by suspending all sorts of benefits, so that soon it was not the workers who felt the cruelty of social warfare, but their families.
Rod Burke allowed no cargoes of either sugar or pineapple to leave the islands and no tourists to come in. The Fort retaliated by closing two of its hotels, and the maids and waiters thus thrown out of work were less able to weather the strike than were the hotel owners.
Goro Sakagawa got the pineapple workers to join the strike. The Fort coldly announced that its food-supply warehouses were nearly empty and it could no longer distribute to stores like Kamejiro Sakagawa's, so one shopkeeper after another faced bankruptcy.
No man can understand Hawaii who does not understand the great strike. It crippled the islands to the point of despair. Newsprint ran low and the existence of the papers was threatened. Food diminished to the one-week mark, and many families went hungry. Sugar plantations saw their crops rotting in the parching sunlight. Pineapple fields went untended, and millions upon millions of unrecoverable dollars were lost. Banks watched their normal flow of business halted. Big stores had neither new stocks nor old customers. Doctors went unpaid and dentists saw no patients. The major hotels could serve only inadequate foods, and the very life of the islands ground slowly to a halt.
For a strike in Hawaii was not like a strike in Florida. It was like nothing the mainland ever knew, for in Florida if the waterfront was tied up, food could be imported by train, and if the trains were closed down, men could use trucks, and if they were struck, hungry