Assessing Hawaii’s
First of two articles
last eight governors
Second of two articles
AS we set out to decide who will govern us for the next four years, I think back on eight governors I have known, starting with Ingram Stainback in 1946. As long as we were a U.S. territory, the president, nudged by Hawaii's business leaders, nominated Caucasians for governor except for Samuel W. King, Hawaiian, and mostly Caucasians for judges. Our state has elected an ethnic rainbow of leaders who nominate an ethnic rainbow of judges and other appointees to be confirmed by an ethnic rainbow of senators. They at last represent true democracy in this community.
Let me recollect:
Joseph Poindexter I didn't know. But he was the man who, under Army duress, signed over his vast Mobilization Day powers to the Army on Dec. 7, 1941, and never got them back as long as he was governor.
The result was a shutdown of civil courts, harsh sentences by military judges for even simple misdemeanors not fully ended until Oct. 24, 1944 -- 28 months after any threat of invasion of Hawaii had been ended by the victory at Midway.
I did know Poindexter's successor, Ingram Stainback, a former federal district judge. He was sworn in Aug. 24, 1942, with an agreement from the Interior and War departments to substantially modify military rule. He ran into formidable delaying tactics from the Army here with support even from some Hawaii business leaders -- but not from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, which rallied to his side.
For me, though, Stainback's deserved hero status for fighting military rule was clouded by his hesitancy about statehood, the ultimate civil right.
He shared, I believe, a distrust of popular rule for fear non-Caucasians might dominate. He and other foot-draggers obscured this anti-democratic holding under the cover of saying Communists among our labor leaders might endanger U.S. security vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Our Communists only wanted to help local labor, not the U.S.S.R.
His successor in 1951 was Oren E. Long, a pro-statehood Truman appointee. Long was a smiling, friendly schoolteacher type who had been superintendent of education. He could talk right past my Star-Bulletin deadlines without answering my questions.
The election of a Republican president, Eisenhower, led to GOP in-fighting over the U.S. Senate role in presidential appointments. The winner: Samuel Wilder King, Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft's preference, not Ike's first choice.
King was a political pro, uncommon for an appointed governor. He was elected delegate to Congress four times beginning in 1934 to fight actively for statehood, then went into the Navy as a captain in World War II.
After the war he presided over the 1950 Constitutional Convention to write a standby state constitution. He was in office when the Democrats took control of both houses of the Legislature in 1954. He set back their ambitions somewhat with 70 vetoes in 1955, a postwar record that stood until Ben Cayetano vetoed 83 bills in 1995.
When King's four years were up in 1957, Eisenhower applied a policy, used also in Alaska and American Samoa, of choosing younger territorial governors who could help build the Republican Party long-term. Ike's surprise Hawaii choice was William F. Quinn, then only 39 and a resident of the territory for only 10 years, but an attractive GOP campaigner who could intermix good speeches with his tenor renditions.
WHEN Hawaii got its first chance to elect a governor as a state in 1959 , Quinn went head to head with John A. Burns, the Democratic delegate to Congress in the statehood fight. Quinn won, but then lost to Burns when they faced off again in 1962.
Quinn was extremely quick and bright but something of a political amateur who had trouble with the excessive patronage demands of his GOP lieutenant governor as well as with the Republican majority in the first state Senate. Quinn's strength was his brilliance, his weakness inexperience in the give-and-take of politics.
TUESDAY: Other Elected Governors
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.
