OPINION: A revealing glimpse at Hawaii’s transition to statehood

A friend told me “I’m going to mail you a book. Read it. It’s unusual.” He mailed the book. I read it. He was right.

The unusual starts with the title: “No Ordinary Man.” The extraordinary man is William Quinn (1919-2006), the last appointed territorial governor of Hawaii and the first elected governor of the new state. He served a total of five years (1957-1962).

Most people, even those who follow politics intently, know little about modern Hawaiian political history unless they live there. What they know can be summed up in three sentences:

• Hawaii entered the union in the late 1950s, about the same time as Alaska.

• Daniel Inouye, a decorated war veteran, had a long career in the Senate, and the Democrat consistently delivered projects and pork to his grateful island constituents.

• Former President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, although some Republicans refuse to believe it.

Almost every American adult knows that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. But the attack seems more like military history and international affairs than domestic political history.

Bill Quinn was born into an affluent St. Louis family — his father was a business executive — at the end of World War I. There are rare children who seem born for glory, and Quinn was one. He grew into a tall, good-looking, bright young man, a dancer, a singer — on St. Louis radio as a youngster no less — and amateur actor on stage. The limelight was his natural habitat. Later, as a political candidate in Hawaii, he often sang at gatherings and rallies. He performed in Honolulu theater too, with leading roles in local productions of Broadway hits “Mister Roberts” and “Brigadoon.”

His family’s Catholic faith and his own belief played a major role in defining him. He attended a Catholic high school and St. Louis University, a church institution. He needed time but eventually his brilliance became obvious to his fellow students, his teachers, his family, and presumably himself. He graduated from St. Louis with academic honors, majoring in philosophy.

It is clear that the local church hierarchy saw him as a sterling representative of Catholic youth and Catholic education. He was expected to shine not just for himself, but also for the church in an era when Catholics were still outsiders in much of the country.

The day after the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Quinn rushed home to St. Louis from law school — Harvard, where else? — to enlist in the Navy. He served most of the war as an intelligence officer in the south Pacific. During his war years, he stopped briefly in Honolulu twice, but saw only what sailors see in a day. Before he departed the states for the Pacific, he married his childhood sweetheart Nancy Witbeck, whom his biographer assures us was “pretty as any movie queen.”

The war over, Quinn returned to Harvard. As he was finishing his law degree, he sat for job interviews and accepted an offer from a Honolulu firm. The Quinns were in the process of creating a large family, seven children in all, and Hawaii paid considerably more than other proposals. Their friends and neighborhoods responded to the news they were packing for Hawaii with questions: “Where is it?” “Do they have any schools there?” and “Are you missionaries are something?” Young people who went to Alaska in the 1940s faced similar questions, with the additional “Are you going to live in an igloo?”

Quinn quickly put his skills to work and began a successful career as a lawyer on behalf of powerful Hawaiian business interests. He wasn’t so much drawn to politics as politics was drawn to him. The GOP had a shortage of young talent and recruited Bill to run for the state senate. Quinn’s biographer Mary Richards is blunt: The Republican Party was the white party. The GOP had no interest in Native Hawaiians or those of Japanese or Filipino origin. The minorities became Democrats — Daniel Inouye the foremost example — and the Republicans were forced into the minority, where they remain to this day.

Quinn was a surprise choice when he was appointed governor by President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower in 1957. No doubt somewhere in Eisenhower’s papers there are letters and memos that explain why. But it is fair to note the obvious: He was young, handsome, dynamic — like Mike Stepovich, another Catholic, whom Ike appointed governor of Alaska. But unlike Stepovich, Quinn, who had been in Hawaii 12 years when appointed, was routinely dismissed by Democrats as an “outsider,” a “carpetbagger,” a “mainlander.”

In his inaugural address, Quinn said “No one feels more strongly than I that we, the people of Hawaii, should select our own governors ...” This required statehood. Quinn was not a major figure in the fight for statehood, which had been underway for years, but as governor, he traveled widely and spread the message. Hawaiians were deeply disappointed that Alaska entered the union first. Their attitude was Hawaii is far more ready to become a state than cold, bleak Alaska, where the caribou outnumbered the voters.

Quinn presided over the transformation of the territorial government into a state government. The transition was rough and seems far more fraught with division than what transpired in Alaska. Appointments were contested, Quinn’s public land proposal was widely opposed, his economic development ideas faced complaint. The economy consisted, Quinn said at the time, of federal spending, sugar, pineapple and tourism. The daily papers were overflowing with governor-versus-Legislature stories — and stories about Quinn’s battles with his lieutenant governor, who was of his own party.

Most of the time Quinn prevailed, bringing modernization to neglected islands and providing economic opportunity to areas where little had existed. Quinn made it a point to be as accessible as possible and spoke to people on every island but his scholarly approach to major issues frustrated many legislators. And he was still derided as a “mainlander” by Democrats. Similarly, in Alaska, Democrats called newcomer Lowell Thomas a “synthetic Alaskan” when he ran for Congress in the ’60s.

Hawaii is a long way from Washington, D.C., but that did not prevent Quinn from having a terrible relationship with Lyndon Johnson when he was majority leader and vice president. Apparently Quinn had not shown Johnson enough deference while lobbying him on statehood. When Johnson came to Honolulu years later, he made sure that Quinn sat at the back of the room at a celebratory banquet. Lady Bird Johnson also refused to speak to his wife when they were alone together. Quinn later said of LBJ, “I have no respect for him or his memory.” Johnson’s behavior is hard to understand, except as a product of his monstrous ego.

By 1962, the Democratic tide was so strong that few Republicans had a chance in the Hawaiian general election. Quinn — and others — lost badly. He returned to private life as a lawyer. There really was no place for him in elective life in a one-party state.

Bill Quinn had come a long way since he was the boy who sang on the radio in St. Louis. So had Hawaii, now a modern state. No doubt he turned to his Catholic faith in defeat, perhaps including what Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker taught: “Our work is to sow. Another generation will be reaping the harvest.”

Michael Carey is an Anchorage writer.

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