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Hiram, Henry
and the peaceable
weaving of Hawaii
Celebrating Hawaii's harmony
A tribute in honor of Henry B. Clark Jr. and the late Hiram L. Fong:
Where: Hilton Hawaiian Village Coral Ballroom
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Lawrence Fuchs' "Hawaii Pono" recorded a famous incident of fisticuffs when the Republican Fong was elected Speaker of the House, displacing a fiery Democrat, Charles Kauhane. Before Kauhane yielded the gavel, he took a swing at Fong, which Fong now says -- in an historic footnote -- he did not return. They became friends. When Kauhane's beautiful wife, Lauhapa, died, Fong gave the eulogy.
In 1954, when the Democrats so famously swept Fong and other Republicans from legislative office, Fong was nearing 50. He was thought to be politically over the hill. Five years later, with the arrival of statehood, two U.S. Senate seats opened up.
"When I announced I was going to run," Fong recalls, "a lot of my friends -- particularly Caucasian friends -- lifted their eyebrows. They said, 'Who is this guy, trying to invade the sacred sanctorum?'"
On the Democratic side of the primary, a young candidate named Frank F. Fasi upset the venerable Chinese-Hawaiian William H. Heen. "After the primary," Fong recalled, "they began to realize I had a chance, and they all came back of me."
Fong became the first Asian-American United States senator and the only senator of color. In Washington, D.C., he found Southerners initially wary that Hawaii had sent a radical to the Senate. "Then they found out I was fiscally responsible -- only on civil rights I was pretty far ahead of them. They all became my friends."
Fong was the founder of one of the early multi-ethnic law firms, Fong, Miho and Choy. Through his influence, his partner Herbert Choy (of Korean ancestry), was nominated and confirmed as a federal judge in U.S. Circuit Court, yet another breakthrough in creating a multiracial America.
Most important of all, Fong built an influential niche on the Senate Committee on Immigration. While others championed Medicare and equal opportunity in the progressive climate of the mid-1960s, Fong championed equal access to immigration regardless of race or country of origin. Almost unnoticed, the 1965 amendment to U.S. immigration law ended the age-old bias in favor of northern Europeans. The result is today's astonishing transformation of the American scene, which is taking on the diversity traditionally found only in Hawaii.
"It wasn't difficult getting the law passed," Fong recalls. "We had the cooperation of most senators with minority populations, such as Portuguese, Greeks, Spanish and so on."
Clark traveled a somewhat parallel path, which has never been documented nor discussed publicly, reflecting his penchant for doing good works in the privacy of his own value system. He sailed into Pearl Harbor on a minesweeper in 1941, made it out the channel at Pearl Harbor on December 7, then returned to settle in Hawaii after the war. It happened that he was married to a member of the Damon family, whose parents had been missionaries to China, and who spoke Chinese.
He began his service on the board of Palolo Home in 1948. That same year, he was asked to serve on the board of directors of the Honolulu Gas Company. Like all of the major companies, this board was all white. After a year of biting his tongue, he asked, "Who are our customers?" He answered his own question: "Mostly non-Caucasian."
"Who are our employees? Mostly non-Caucasian. Who are our stockholders? Mostly Caucasian." Pause. "Well, why don't we do something about it?"
Young Clark was commissioned to recruit two new directors, who turned out to be Kee Fook Zane of Liberty Bank -- Clark's fellow director from Palolo Home -- and Peter Fukunaga of Servco. Other corporations quickly followed suit by recruiting non-Caucasians to their boards.
Integration of the social clubs went less smoothly. By the mid-sixties, the name of the Harvard-educated attorney and jurist Masaji Marumoto was put up for membership in the all-white Pacific Club. His nomination was vetoed. Clark remembers feeling outraged. He maneuvered himself onto the membership committee, along with a like-minded friend, and then into the committee chairmanship. He quietly spread the word that the day of change had arrived.
Thereafter he was approached by a disgruntled member. "If you bring a nonwhite person into this club," Clark recalls him saying, "I'll leave."
"I looked him in the eye and said, 'You should just leave now.'" Without a word of publicity for Clark, the famous battle of the Pacific Club was won.
Institutions must rebuild periodically or they crumble. Attorney and former City Councilman Leigh-Wai Doo has taken several years out of his career to lead a reconstruction, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather's service to the Home. He has recruited his two older friends as honorary co-chairmen. They joke about fending off the effects of age, but each is a serious advocate for Palolo Home and more generally for expanding health services to the aged.
They are authentic symbols of a history that began in 1896 with the construction of Chinese Hospital, which opened its doors to all as Palama General Hospital. In 1917 it opened Palolo Chinese Home as an extension of its work. A year later, a Portuguese cowboy fell from his horse and arrived at the Home to start a multi-racial tradition that expanded to all groups.
At one point, the kitchen served as much poi as rice. Leaders in Hawaii's early-day internationalist movement, such as Theodore Richards and Frank Atherton, played key roles in the Home's history, but no one served on the Board as long as Clark.
He became a director in 1948, and an emeritus director in 1996. Fong joined the board in 1965.
Fong and Clark are old friends who delight in each other's company. Fong's goal is to live to be 120. Clark is more reticent but works out three days a week.
As a multiracial society, we tend to take our condition for granted, but it didn't just happen. As much as any two people today, Hiram Fong and Henry Clark helped build a community life in which people get along, interact freely, benefit from one another's contributions and enjoy one another. They deserve our respect and aloha.
