Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 22, Number 4, 1 April 2005 — New book, documentary shed cultural light on [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

New book, documentary shed cultural light on

By Sterling Kini Wong No other criminal case in Hawai'i's history has ever rivaled the sensationalism and drama of the notorious Massie affair. The 1932 trial of a white U.S. naval officer accused of murdering one of his wife's alleged rapists, who was Hawaiian, grabbed headlines in newspapers across the nation and abroad, and shattered Hawai'i's image as a carefree paradise getaway. In that year alone, the New York Times published nearly 200 stories on the case and the Associated Press called it one of the top world news events of the year. The story, whieh exposed blatant racism toward Hawaiians and Asians, inspired several books, a loeal play and a CBS mini-series. But none of them have placed the Massie event within the context of Hawai'i's complex social history as does David Stannard's new book Honor KiIIing, to be released April 11 (Viking, $25.95). An accompanying PBS documentary titled The

Massie Affair, for whieh Stannard served as a consultant, will air on KHET on April 18 at 8 p.m. Stannard, an American Studies professor at the University of Hawai'i-Mānoa, pored through hundreds of documents and eonducted numerous interviews with residents who were alive during the time to present an insightful and provocative discussion of how the Massie case helped transform the islands' ethnic and political landscapes during and after the territorial period. By the late 1800s, Stannard writes, plantations had forever changed the ethnic eomposition of the islands. Hawai'i's booming economy was riding on the backs of the Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and Lilipino immigrants who were brought to Hawai'i to work in the eane and pineapple fields for mere slave wages. While these ethnic groups, along with Hawai'i's native people, comprised the overwhelming majority of the populahon, whites were able to maintain control of the islands' economy and govern-

ment by keeping the plantation workers divided and distrustful of eaeh other. "With a broken and submissive workforce, plantation owners reaped enormous harvests of sugar and pineapple, harvests that in past years could hardly have been imagined." Stannard writes. "... A united front of all plantation laborers was the haole elite's worst fear." By the 1920s, however, many of these workers had fulfilled their contracts and were moving away from the plantations and into the tenements of Honolulu. It was there, in some of the worst slums in the nation, that the children of these different ethnic groups began to befriend one another. Stannard points out that this unified generation would

be the first to challenge, in small ways at first, the white dominance over the islands. It's with this backdrop that in the early morning hours of Sept. 31, 1931, the white and affluent īhalia Massie was found walking alone with a swollen jaw in WaikM. Although her elaim that she was gang-raped by a group of Native Hawaiians seemed dubious (with many suspecting that she had in fact been abused by her husband), five young men of Chinese, Japanese and Hawaiian descent were arrested and tried for the charges. After a hung jury failed to convict the men, Massie's husband, mother and two accomplices kidnapped and shot one of them, Joseph Kahahawai. National newspapers justified the murder as an "honor killing" and claimed that Hawai'i was unsafe because "bands of degenerate natives or half-castes lie in wait for white women driving by." Adding to the spectacle was the presence of Clarence Darrow, who was the most famous crimiSee MASSIE on page 22

The Massie Affair April 18, 8 p.m Hawai'i Puhlie Television KHET Channel 11

MASSIE from pagel3

nal attorney in America at that time, as the accused vengeance killers' defense lawyer. With the entire nation watching, the jury found all four defendants guilty of manslaughter, but Hawai'i's governor at the time, Lawrence Judd, succumbed to heavy poliheal pressure and reduced their sentences to one hour. Two years later, the Massies divorced, and in 1963 Thalia's body was found in her apartment after she overdosed on barbiturates. Meanwhile, the rape charges against the other four loeal men were eventually dropped after the Territory of Hawai'i hired a private company to investigate the case. The company's 300-page report found that not only was it virtually impossible for the accused to have eommitted the rape, but it could not confirm that īhalia was in fact raped at all. O