Template talk:Legal status of Hawaii footer

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No wonder you got few comments. It is difficult to get her to discuss, and it is not obvious anyone has discussed this. I think the template has no use, as the information it contains should be in one or more articles, not in a footer. What was the point of creating a template, the typical use of which is to allow display on multiple pages? I'm baffled. Also, If you live in Hawai‘i you would know that there is no "dispute" over the legal status of Hawai‘i. What happened over 100 years ago may have been wrong, even shameful, but has no "legal bearing" on anything - Marshman 18:39, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "White supremacist oligarchy"

The phrase white-supremacist oligarchy is only a messenger; let us not shoot the messenger. One citation is:

Stannard, David E. Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawai‘i. New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 2005. ISBN 0670033995

[…] for the first half of the twentieth century, most of those famously friendly and multihued people of paradise lived under the authoritarian rule of an openly white supremacist oligarchy.

During that time the islands' economic life was in the grip of a handful of local corporations with tightly interlocked directorates. The same few white businessmen met periodically to decide which of them, or their subordinates, would be the next governor. Their selection was then conveyed to the president of the United States, who made the appointment. Hawai‘i was an American colony (the official term was "territory"), and voting for their governor was not a privilege enjoyed by the islands' inhabitants, 80 percent of whom were native Hawaiians or Asians.

This was a political arrangement envied by outsiders of a certain stripe, people like Army Major (ultimately General) George S. Patton. Patton was a frequent visitor to Hawai‘i, and a close friend and polo partner of the islands' most powerful business leader, Walter S. Dillingham. Their racial views had much in common. Even in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Patton would write that he regarded Jews as "lower than animals … a sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time." For his part, Dillingham believed—and so testified before Congress—that God had made the white race to rule and the colored to be ruled. It was as plain as "the pigment in the skin," he said, adding that when a white man is "asked to go out in the sun and work in the canebrake, away from the tropical breeze, you are subjecting [him] to something that the good Lord did not create him to do."

Patton and Dillingham had enjoyed a lively correspondence for years. With the onset of the Depression, they began expressing deep concern regarding the future of American politics. In one exchange of 1932, Patton complained about "the total lack of balls and backbone evinced by our rulers." At least "in Hawai‘i you can start a dictatorship and hold on for a while," he wrote, "but here that much to be desired form of government can hardly be put into effect."

For most of Hawai‘i's people, Patton's "much to be desired form of government" had long been their everyday reality. Federal investigations prior to World War II routinely compared conditions on the sugar and pineapple plantations to slavery or involuntary servitude. In 1920, when half the territory's adults labored for an average of less than eight cents an hour, a report by the U.S. Department of the Interior described their lives as driven "by the biting lash of necessity … in the spirit of the slave." A decade and a half later a director of the National Labor Relations Board observed that workers in Hawai‘i lived "more like slaves than free people … They have no chance to change their jobs or get away from their present environment. They speak and mumble in undertones." His report concluded that for the majority of the population, Hawai‘i was the very "picture of Fascism."

The above is from pp. 1–2, with sources listed on p. 431:

The Patton quotation on Jews is from his journal, dated September 15, 1945, and cited in Eizenstat, Imperfect Justice, p. 11. His favorable comment on dictatorship is from a letter to Walter Dillingham, dated July 11, 1932, in the Walter F. Dillingham Papers (Box 24, Folder 553). Dillingham's congressional testimony is quoted in Duus, The Japanese Conspiracy, p. 273. The first of the two quotations comparing the lot of Hawai‘i's plantation laborers with slaves comes from the U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, Survey of Education in Hawaii, cited in Okihiro, Cane Fires, p. 141. The second is from a report by the National Labor Relations Board's Western Regional Director, Elwyn J. Eagen, "Report on the Hawaiian Islands," quoted in Zalburg, A Spark Is Struck, p. 16. […]

From the book jacket: David E. Stannard received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently a professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i. He is a Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and American Council of Learned Societies fellow whose five previous books include American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. He lives in He‘eia on the island of O‘ahu.

-- IslandGyrl 12:19, 14 November 2005 (UTC)