1920 Politics (Hawaii)

1920 Politics also referred to as “Jim Crow” circa 1930, was a Republican political strategy to reassert the authority of the white race and promote American Anglo-Saxon values, in what was then the US Territory of Hawaii.

Before 1920 Hawaii was divided into various nationalist groups of Whites, Hawaiians, Chinese Portuguese, Japanese, Okinawans, Filipinos, and Koreans.

At the time white nationalism by Republicans had been an acceptable position. Since annexation, Hawaii's white-dominated oligarchy comprised three branches: the HSPA and Big Five sugar plantations dominated economics, the Republican Party dominated politics, and the white minority dominated society. These organs supported each other: one important example was that the plantations were a crucial source of Republican votes. On Election Day, the crude election booths allowed plantation management to survey which worker voted Republican or not; those who did not were disciplined or fired. While several workers had the right to vote, they valued their livelihood more than their right to choose their candidate.

Racism was not only a social issue but more importantly an economic one. Hawaii’s plantation economy relied on the ready availability of cheap labor to work the fields, and any increase in wages was costly as pay was distributed over the large work force. For the white planters, the two largest groups — the Japanese and Filipinos — rivaled each other, dividing the labor force so that when one group went on strike the other would become strike breakers. But in 1920 the Japanese and Filipinos reconciled their differences and joined in the dual strike of 1920.

After the 1920 strike, greater attention was given to the Asian majority. At the time, half of public school students were of Japanese ancestry. The white minority petitioned Governor Charles J. McCarthy for racial segregation to prevent their children for being exposed to what they believed to be the "corrupting influences" of the colored students. McCarthy had little sympathy for the immigrant Asian population and agreed to create English Standard Schools for whites and some Hawaiians, who were given privileges over students attending the more prevalent public schools. Republican Governor Wallace Rider Farrington came to power, stating that the “Racial elements are out of balance and seriously in need of adjusting”. Republicans feared that a united labor force would take over the economy and eventually the political system, overturning the plantation economy, race hierarchy, and social values of Hawaii. The previous strategy known as Divide-and-Control had failed. Republicans created a new strategy to prevent majority rule. Divide-and-Control was unstable since it relied on different ethnicities confronting each other. Instead of Divide-and-Control, where Japanese identity was the center of the Japanese community and the Filipino identity was the center of the Filipino community, the 1920 Politics strategy was to Americanize the Japanese and Filipino communities to disconnect them from their own identity, to adopt a Western identity and to further the power of the white population.

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