During the recent sling-load dispute on Honolulu's waterfront between a shipping company and the longshoremen, I tried to measure the progress organized dockworkers have made during the past 15-20 years by recalling some personal experiences.
A decade and a half ago, when I was a stevedore, a ship foreman checked out individual longshoremen or a gang as he pleased. He knew he would have no repercussion from the unorganized workers. Therefore he demanded bigger sling loads of cargo and yelled from the deck into the ship's hold at perspiring longshoremen stripped to the waist or wearing only shorts to speed up the work. Once in a great while a gang would balk and refuse to be pitted against modern machinery. Then the ship foreman barked: "Check out!"
When we were checked out we expected punishment in the form of less work and assignment to handle unclean and hard-to-handle cargo. The other gangs on the ship continued working, forced to pile cargo on lift boards as high as the ship foreman demanded.
Unlike today, the gangs did not stick together. There was no union to hold them together. Among us workers union consciousness did not come automatically. The atmosphere was not hospitable to unionization programs. The employer propaganda in the press had poisoned even the minds of workers, against unions. The big employers everywhere were fighting the Wagner National Labor Relations Act, which they were to defeat years later during the Truman administration, with the Taft-Hartley-Law.
There was no government educational program to let us workers know that a new law, the Wagner Act, had been passed, which gave us protection we had never enjoyed before. This information was not publicized by the employer-controlled dailies.
"Conspiracy" of Yesterday and Today
It was then a "conspiracy" against the stevedoring company to belong to a union. I learned of the term "blacklist" after I had joined the International Longshoremen's & Warehousemen's Union. Among union and non-union stevedores the Big Five's conspiracy to deny work to pro-union men was commonly discussed. The magnified version of that past "conspiracy," which was an attitude used by employers to intimidate the dockworkers, is today's red-baiting, political frameups, McCarthyism and loyalty oaths that are used to suppress militancy and independent thinking, deny employment to any non-conformist and strike fear into everyone. True, unions had been organized during the favorable climate of the New Deal era, but at present, threats to the existence of militant unions are as real as ever.
Administration Master-Minded by Big Business
Today, on a national scale, the red issue is being used to split major unions. The Truman administration, which is masterminded by representatives of big business, has played a major role in splitting the CIO. The left-wing unions were expelled because they refused to support the Democratic Party or the administration's foreign policy, or both. The CIO and the AFL, worried about a depression, went along on the war program. And in doing so, they have helped to keep the Taft-Hartley Law on the books, an anti-labor legislation which President Truman himself denounced as a slave-labor law but a weapon he has already used nine times to break strikes.
Today, after a few years of the war program that benefits the big financiers and industrialists, more and more of the rank and file workers complain of higher taxes, higher prices and want peace. They are appalled by the corruption among Democratic Party officials to whom their leaders have latched their unions.
Thus, it becomes a "conspiracy" against the big-business captured government for anyone to call for peace. Harry Bridges was thrown in jail last year for advocating peaceful settlement of the Korean war. The mass protest of Hawaiian sugar workers greatly influenced his release from prison.
The Great Fear Is Depression
A bungling administration makes criticism of corruption, graft, excess profits of big industrialists from the war program, tax amortization to the tune of billions of dollars to these firms, conduct "subversive" to the government. Before our very eyes freedom of the press is being curtailed, because the facts cannot be revealed.
The great fear of an incompetent administration, rife with graft and corruption, is depression. The fear, actually, is not of an attack coming from the Soviet Union. More than a year ago, the administration's propaganda stressed the imminence of Russian attack. Now the propaganda is "security" in arming to the teeth. Peace overtures from the Soviet Union are dismissed as sheer propaganda. There seems to be no fear of attack from abroad as the administration pursues a war program that will reach peak production in a year or more. In the meantime, we are ringing the Soviet Union with military and air bases, all of which are extremely provocative. This is equivalent to the use of Mexico, the Panama Canal and Canada for bases, by any nation hostile to the U. S.
The most revealing fact showing the administration does not fear foreign attack but depression in a peacetime economy is its aloofness toward civilian defense. There is more interest in throwing weapons into the arms of reactionary regimes which no one actually trusts, merely to keep the war economy going.
Functions Best In Producing To Destroy
People see this particularly as they begin to take more interest in government spending as higher taxes bite off their income. But many are afraid to complain.
In various ways I hear people ask: "What is wrong? "There is something gravely wrong when our government functions best when it is producing to destroy mankind and the goods they create."
In the 30s, a few years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, there was a widespread belief that the New Deal would do away with depression. When I entered the University of Hawaii in 1937, I had such hopes. I felt the starving depression days, when I survived on a bowl of noodles a day in the Aala district when the going was rough, were over.
In 1937, I lived with a family who had helped me in attaining a high school education by finding work for me during the summer months. I had confided to the wife that I wanted very much to continue my education. So one morning in September, she woke me up early and reminded me that the freshmen were taking entrance examinations at the university that week. When the moment came for me to return to the classroom again, I felt old among younger students. The six years that I had knocked around had increased my curiosity about various issues and had changed my outlook, and this helped me to enjoy my two and a half years at the University of Hawaii.
The WPA Had Its Literary and Artistic Facet
I spent some time down on the waterfront, working during weekends and on some week nights when shipping was busy. During the summer months I worked as a longshoreman.
During my freshman year I was fortunate in having a young instructor in English who encouraged reading and tried to teach us how to think. I learned then that the Roosevelt WPA projects on which I worked as a laborer in Pahoa, Puna, had a literary counterpart. New writers with novel approach, with thinking inspired under the New Deal, were producing proletarian literature.
I believe all those who studied under him saw the world in a different prospective, different from what they had seen only a few months before in high schools. There was nothing radical about this instructor. He was intensely interested in making students read and think for themselves.
The Students Lost a Good Instructor
It must have been about the end of my sophomore year that I read in the Hawaii Sentinel, a weekly, that the university regents did not renew the contract of this instructor. The Big Five, which controlled the regents, had a way of blacklisting or getting rid of faculty members who made students think, not only over what they read for their classes, but of local and world problems in association with various books they picked up in the library. I gradually came to this realization when I observed that quite a few instructors and professors restrained themselves from saying in lectures what they knew to be facts.
I found that professors whose lectures were dry, appeared most sensitive to non-attention. For example, elementary economics was taught by a person whose lecture notes were worn out and faded from years of handling. One day after we had moved into the new social science building, the wind blew in from the window behind him and scattered his notes on the floor. The pages became mixed up. Unable to continue without his notes which he must have used for more than a decade, he dismissed the class.
About the Professors Who Stayed On
This professor rotated his examination questions from year to year, bringing them back in a cycle, so that all any enterprising student had to do was buy the collected set of his questions from former students and study them to make the passing grade. Elementary psychology examinations were handled in the same manner. The examinations were a farce, with honest students who devoted their time to reading the assignments and taking lecture notes often making the poorer grades.
The New Deal was something which students taking elementary economics wanted to know about and would have been interested in. The professor almost never touched on it. Those who had borrowed lecture notes from students who had taken his course, waited for him to crack his jokes, which came at the precise moment and in the same words that he had uttered the year before and in years before that. A large number of students laughed at the exact timing of the jokes which were written in the professor's notebook.
Faculty Members Who Gave Their Courses Meaning
There were refresher courses and lectures, however, and one of them was the study of the cultural history of the western world. This showed the changing process in history, of man from the primitive times to the more modern and complex era.
A course in American literature made me see how writings of a given period reflected the social conditions of the time. Thus, writings of Emerson, Melville, Tom Paine, Drieser and Steinbeck came to have more meaning for me. At that time the social, political and intellectual climate were hospitable to books like John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath or In Dubious Battle.
While at the university I took part annually in raising funds for students in China who were moving inland because of Japanese imperialist aggression. I remember writing a column in the Ka Leo, university newspaper, asking support of the fund drive. In the Oriental Institute library I read of the conditions under which Chinese students studied. There was a description of a place named Yenan in the northwest hinterland of the vast country. Students were studying in caves, I read. I included this information in my column. I did not know that years later I would live in one of those caves in Yenan as a U. S. army personnel.
My Interest In the American South Grows
Activities such as this brought me close to a YMCA secretary who encouraged me to study on the Mainland. Through him I received a scholarship. We chose Georgia. By then I was deeply interested in the South. I had read some writings of Erskine Caldwell. I had become interested in the Negro people. I wanted to major either in sociology or journalism.
During my second year at the university I had become intimate with a Japanese American graduate student. His home was in Hamakua. He was brilliant and made straight "A's" without much difficulty.
He expressed the opinion frequently that people of Oriental extraction did not receive equal opportunities here. He seemed bitter against discrimination. When he worked in a bookstore in town he spoke of the double standard of treatment of white and non-white employes.
Discrimination Drove Some AJAs to Japan
One day he asked me to look at his face carefully.
Do you see any difference in my right and left sides?" he asked.
I did not see any distinguishing features.
"One of these days you will," he said. "I was operated on and a doctor accidentally cut a nerve. Part of my face is paralyzed and it will not age. The other side will."
"Did you sue the doctor?" I asked.
"How can I? He is an influential haole doctor. He gave me a couple of hundred dollars and that was all," he said.
This friend of mine wanted to go to Japan. One of my classmates was thinking of going there also. They explained that there would be no discrimination. In the prewar years, discrimination was greater and where today positions are open to Orientals, formerly they were not.
"You'll get drafted into the army and sent to China," I told my friend.
"But the war won't last forever," he said. "I'm going anyway."
I saw him leave on a ship during the summer of 1940. I told him he should hurry back if he felt that there would be war between the U. S. and Japan. He said he could get ahead in Japan. He would not stay here to fight discrimination and improve conditions.
A few weeks after his departure I sailed for the West Coast, then travelled to Georgia. The YMCA secretary and others suggested that I keep in close touch with them because war with Japan seemed only a matter of time.