Fighting in Paradise
Labor Unions, Racism, and Communists in the Making of Modern Hawai‘i
Powerful labor movements played a critical role in shaping modern Hawaii, beginning in the 1930s, when International Longshore and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU) representatives were dispatched to the islands to organize plantation and dock laborers. They were stunned by the feudal conditions they found in Hawaii, where the majority of workers—Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino in origin—were routinely subjected to repression and racism at the hands of white bosses.
The wartime civil liberties crackdown brought union organizing to a halt; but as the war wound down, Hawaii workers’ frustrations boiled over, leading to an explosive success in the forming of unions. During the 1950s, just as the ILWU began a series of successful strikes and organizing drives, the union came under McCarthyite attacks and persecution. In the midst of these allegations, Hawaii’s bid for statehood was being challenged by powerful voices in Washington who claimed that admitting Hawaii to the union would be tantamount to giving the Kremlin two votes in the U.S. Senate, while Jim Crow advocates worried that Hawaii’s representatives would be enthusiastic supporters of pro–civil rights legislation.
Hawaii’s extensive social welfare system and the continuing power of unions to shape the state politically are a direct result of those troubled times. Based on exhaustive archival research in Hawaii, California, Washington, and elsewhere, Gerald Horne’s gripping story of Hawaii workers’ struggle to unionize reads like a suspense novel as it details for the first time how radicalism and racism helped shape Hawaii in the twentieth century.
Fighting in Paradise tells a story that is both remarkable and, considering its atypical milieu, remarkably relevant. . . . For anyone interested in the confluence of race and class in social movements, the political role of organized labor, or the impact of left-wing activists in the union movement, the story of the ILWU in Hawaii is a revelation.
Horne has made another important contribution to the history of labor and the left and the tangled history of racism in America. Those who read [Fighting in Paradise], whatever their background, will find it enlightening and fascinating.
Anyone interested in how far Hawaii has come in terms of racial equality and labor rights would be hard-pressed to find a more informational read.
As an avid student of Hawaii history, I found Fighting in Paradise to be a deeply resourceful and refreshingly different version of Hawaii’s social and economic history. . . . [It] ranks with Fuch’s Hawaii Pono as an almost revolutionary perspective and interpretation of Hawaii history and its working class struggle to attain economic fairness, equity and integrity.
Gerald Horne offers readers an eye-opening account explaining how the labor movement and the left played decisive roles in moving Hawai‘i from feudal colony to the most progressive state in the union. Deeply researched and highly textured, Fighting in Paradise should be required reading for all citizens, Mainlanders especially, who seek to extricate our increasingly multicultural nation from its contemporary difficulties.
