Hawaii - James Michener [598]
"You're right!" Hong Kong agreed hastily. "And nobody expects Gregory's to copy you. But it looks to me, Hoxworth, as if we're entering a new age. We don't have to have handouts from above any longer. We pay good wages. We tax. We get the economy moving real fast. Everybody is better off. Even you."
"Have you ever heard of an art museum financed by taxation? Do you think the smart young Japanese who are coming up so fast will put aside one penny for a good university or an orchestra? Will a dozen Gregory's ever make a decent society?"
"Hoxworth, you're going to be surprised," Hong Kong assured him. "When we get a functioning democracy here, our boys are going to vote for museums, universities, medical clinics. And they'll tax their own people like hell to pay for them. Hawaii will be the paradise people used to talk about."
"I can't believe it," Hoxworth argued. "The good society is always the reflection of a few men who had the courage to do the right thing. It is never voted into being. It is never accomplished if it's left to the Gregory's of the world." But when they parted he said something that would have been totally unthinkable two years earlier: "By the way, Hong Kong, if you spot any smart young Japanese who are as intelligent as you are, let me know." "What do you have in mind?" Hong Kong asked. "You're doing so well on our boards we thought it might be a good idea . . ."
"It would be," Hong Kong said quickly. "If you pick up young Shigeo Sakagawa, you'll be getting a winner."
"Isn't he running for senator ... on the Democratic ticket?" "Yes."
"How could I take such a man onto our boards?" Hoxworth asked. "You won't find any good young Japanese running on the Republican ticket," Hong Kong said flatly.
"What are you, Hong Kong?" Hale asked. "When I was poor, I was a Democrat. Now that I have responsibilities, I'm a Republican. But I make my campaign contributions only to smart young men like Shigeo .. . and they always seem to be Democrats."
"Let's talk about this again, after the election," Hoxworth said, and for the first time he started listening to Shigeo Sakagawa's campaign speeches. But as the campaign grew hotter, he heard Shig saying one night: "All over the world nations have had to fight for land reform. In England they accomplished it by the vote, and things went well. In France they had to have a bloody revolution, and all went badly. I have worked in Japan for General MacArthur, giving great landed estates to the peasants, and all the time I worked there I said to myself, 'I ought to be home in Hawaii, doing the same thing.' Because I knew what you know. Hawaii is generations behind the times. Our land is held by a few big families, and they lease it out to us in niggardly amounts as they see fit . . ."
"The young fool's a communist," Hale snorted as he turned off the radio, and there was no more talk about inviting Shigeo Sakagawa to join The Fort.
AFTER the presidential elections in 1952, Congressman Clyde V. Carter of the Thirty-ninth District in Texas appointed himself a committee of one to investigate--for the fourteenth time-- Hawaii's fitness for statehood. He reached Honolulu in mid-December bearing with him only three minor prejudices: he hated to the point of nausea anyone who wasn't a white man; he knew from experience that rich men were the saviors of the republic; and he loathed Republicans. Thus he was not completely happy in Hawaii, where rich men were invariably Republicans, and where sixty per cent of the people he met were obviously not Caucasian. In the first five minutes he decided: "This place must never be a state."
He was therefore surprised when the welcoming committee, consisting of Hoxworth Hale, Whipple Janders and Black Jim Mc-Lafferty, head of the Democratic Party in the islands, gave florid but hard-hitting defenses of statehood. He was particularly impressed