Hanapepe Massacre
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On September 9, 1924, toward the end of a long, drawn-out strike of Filipino sugar workers on Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi, local police shot dead sixteen strikers in what came to be known later as the Hanapēpē Massacre. As reproachful as it may appear in retrospect, the incident did not arouse contemporary public censure nor bring into question the legitimacy of the coercive agents or their actions.
[edit] History
By the 1920s, the sugar plantation owners in Hawaiʻi had become disillusioned with both Japanese and Filipino workers. They spent the next few years trying to get the U.S. Congress to relax the Chinese Exclusion Act so that they could bring in new Chinese workers. Congress, in a period when racism was more open than today, prevented the importation of Chinese labor.
Unfortunately, organized labor in the 1920s' U.S. mainland was also infected with racism and supported the Congress in this action. For a while it looked as though militant unionism on the sugarplantations was dead. To ensure the complete subjugation of Labor, the Hawaiian Territorial Legislature passed laws against "criminal syndicalism, anarchistic publications and picketing."
This repression with penalties up to 10 years in prison did not stifle the discontent of the workers. Particularly the Filipinos, who were rapidly becoming the dominant plantation labor force, had long, deep seated grievances. As the latest immigrants they were the most discriminated against, and held in the most contempt. Although the planters had claimed there was a labor shortage and they were actively recruiting workers from the Philippines, they screened out and turned back any arrivals that could read or write. They wanted only illiterate workers. Of 600 men who had arrived in the islands voluntarily, they sent back 100. But these measures did not prevent discontent from spreading.
[edit] Strikes
In 1922, Filipino labor activist Pablo Manlapit was active among them and had organized a new Filipino Higher Wage Movement which claimed 13,000 members. In April, 1924, a strike was called on the island of Kauaʻi. The chief demands were for $2 a day in wages and reduction of the workday to 8 hours. It looked like history was repeating itself. The plantation owners used repression, armed forces, the National Guard, and strike breakers who were paid a higher wage than the strikers demanded. Again workers were turned out of their homes. The propaganda machine whipped up racism. Spying and infiltration of the strikers ranks was acknowledged by Jack Butler, executive head of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association.
Arrests of strike leaders was used to destroy the workers' solidarity. People were bribed to testify against them. On September 9, 1924 outraged strikers seized two strike breakers at Hanapēpē, Kauaʻi and prevented them from going to work. The police, armed with clubs and guns came to the "rescue" at the union headquarters. In stark constrast, the Filipino strikers had only homemade weapons and knives to defend themselves.
The Associated Press flashed the story of what followed across the United States in the following words: Honolulu. - Twenty persons dead, unnumbered injured lying in hospital, officers under orders to shoot strikers as they approached, distracted widows with children tracking from jails to hospitals and morgues in search of missing strikers - this was the aftermath of a clash between cane strikers and workers on the McBryde plantation, Tuesday at Hanapepe, island of Kauai. The dead included sixteen Filipinos and four policemen.
[edit] Aftermath
101 Filipinos were arrested, and 76 were brought to trial and 60 were given four year jail sentences. Pablo Manlapit was charged with subornation of perjury and was sentenced to two to ten years in prison. The Hawaiʻi Hochi charged that he had been manipulated into prison, a victim of framed up evidence, perjured testimony, racial prejudice and class hatred. Shortly thereafter, he was paroled on condition that he leave Hawaiʻi. After eight months, the strike disintegrated, illustrating once again that racial unionism in Hawaiʻi was doomed to failure.
The Federationist, the official publication of the American Federation of Labor, reported that in 1924, the ten leading sugar companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange paid dividends averaging 17 percent. From 1913 to 1923, the eleven leading sugar companies paid cash dividends of 172.45 percent, and in addition, most of them issued large stock dividends.
After the 1924 strike, the labor movement in Hawaiʻi dwindled but it never died. Discontent among the workers seethed but seldom surfaced. Pablo Manlapit, who was imprisoned and then exiled returned to the islands in 1932 and started a new organization, this time hoping to include other ethnic groups. But the time was not ripe in the depression years. There were small nuisance strikes in 1933 that made no headway and involved mostly Filipinos.
