Honor Killing: How the Infamous “Massie Affair” Transformed Hawaii
By David E. Stannard
Viking, 466 pages, $25.95
We can pick a lot of ways to tell the story of the United States. Depending on your age, your politics, where you grew up or how you came up, you can tell the story so it sings or so it cries. You can start with the Founding Fathers in powdered wigs speaking golden prose that barely fits on the marbled fronts of monuments to the human spirit. Or you can begin with those men’s slaves, bleeding in well-worked fields so that men such as Thomas Jefferson could spend their afternoons composing their high-sounding rhetoric. You get the idea.
The wonder is how many stories can be true at the same time. For the more literal-minded among us, the idea that two stories that run in nearly opposite directions–or several stories that run in several directions–can all be true is frustrating or even ridiculous to consider.
Now a new story of the American experience is gaining ground in a number of places–most of them outside the U.S. This story has a simple title: American empire. It begins with the conquest of Indians’ lands; it turns south for the war to take Mexican lands; then it crosses the water to tell of the seizing of Spanish colonies and the annexing of the Hawaiian kingdom; it runs on into the fields and mines of Central America; then it unfolds in the post-World War nations of Western Europe and East Asia; and the last chapter, almost too new for the historian’s pen, needs to be written on the harsh landscapes of central Asia and the Persian Gulf. President Bush himself has starkly stated that this history has no place in the American canon:
“America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance and refused.”
But just because the president says it doesn’t mean it can’t be true, even if it is only one truth–and a little-understood one at that–among many.
David Stannard, in his riveting retelling of one of the great trials of the early 20th Century–the Massie case in Hawaii–most surely does believe in the story of American empire. His blunt account of six local men in Hawaii falsely accused of beating and raping a white woman and the subsequent “honor” killing of one of those accused men by the woman’s husband and mother and two white sailors is a red-hot tale of imperial cruelty and injustice.
Stannard is best known as the author of “American Holocaust: the Conquest of the New World”; he is not an advocate of the balanced, on-the-one-hand-and-then-on-the-other-hand school of scholarship. In this volume as in all his other recent work, his radical politics are on display. For some that perspective might be off-putting, but for readers interested in a powerfully told, deeply researched, politically inflected story of men and women caught in the roiling tides of American empire in the Pacific, this book is a page-turner.
The Massie case has two beginnings. Most obviously the story began early Sunday morning, Sept. 13, 1931, when Thalia Massie, wife of Navy Lt. Thomas Massie, stationed at Pearl Harbor, told Honolulu police that a gang of Hawaiian men had raped her on the outskirts of Waikiki. But as Stannard persuasively argues, the Massie case also began in the middle of the 19th Century when white Americans began to take economic control of the Hawaiian kingdom. By the end of the 19th Century, in cahoots with national politicians, these haole (white) elites successfully fomented an uprising that led to the American take-over of the islands. Stannard shows that this context, of white American control of Hawaii, had everything to do with how the rape accusation, the ensuing trial and the murder of a young Hawaiian man named Joseph Kahahawai played out.
Several books (and movies) about the Massie affair are already available, but none touches Stannard’s. Not only is he a first-rate traditional historian who has successfully mined never-before-used archival material, he is also a long-time Hawaii insider. Through numerous contacts he has been able to conduct fruitful interviews and discover new material. More importantly, he has a remarkable empathy for the non-haole population of Hawaii, especially the native Hawaiians. Stannard makes readers understand what the American takeover of Hawaii meant for the people who once called the islands their own. Empire here is no abstraction but a lived story of people politically disenfranchised who are ruled by racist military officials and a distant federal government.
While other accounts of the case have cast doubt on the rape charges made by Thalia Massie, Stannard dismantles them. He shows that most of those who prosecuted the young men charged with the crime knew they could not have been the assailants. Several of the prosecutors knew it was extremely unlikely Massie had been raped at all. To Stannard’s cheers, a majority of the jury at the trial rejected the prosecution’s case, creating a hung jury. On mainland America, the failure of the jury–made up mostly of non-whites–to convict was seen overwhelmingly as a kind of reverse racism, proof that non-white men would not find their brothers guilty of harming a white. When Massie’s husband and mother, Grace Fortescue, accompanied by sailors, went out and murdered one of the men Massie had said raped her, American national public opinion, and numerous public leaders, leapt to the lynch gang’s defense. After a Hawaii jury found them guilty of murder (Clarence Darrow was Thomas Massie’s defense lawyer), Hawaii’s appointed governor bowed to the national white support by pardoning them.
Stannard shows that Hawaii’s local population, rather than riot, responded to the series of injustices by organizing. He argues, in a bit of a stretch, that outrage over the Massie affair, especially the pardon of the lynch mob, led to a political upheaval that unified labor and created a new political coalition that created a progressive order that endures to this day in Hawaii.
While it is true that in certain respects Hawaii is the most progressive state in America, and that the Massie affair did have an important impact on the island’s political trajectory, Stannard knows that other key factors related to labor organizing and the post-World War II political economy of Hawaii had even more to do with the islands’ political development. Nonetheless, he’s right to emphasize the galvanizing effect the affair had on Hawaii.
Stannard tells a powerful story in which American empire, based on principles of white supremacy, is one of the most important characters. For those interested in other stories, let’s say about gender equity in American life, don’t expect much. Stannard has no sympathy (not that she seems to deserve much) for Thalia Massie, who was clearly brutally beaten by somebody. Nor does he show concern for any of the other raped or sexually abused women he casually, even dismissively, describes in his history of the Massie affair. It would not have weakened Stannard’s persuasive case if he had allowed some sympathy for battered or sexually exploited girls and women to enter his narrative.
But that is not the story Stannard wanted to tell. And the story we choose to foreground–about American history or, often enough, our own lives–usually allows little room for other perspectives. Good history often demands that we see a single story from more than one angle. I’ll leave definitions of good politics and good human understanding for others to judge.
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David Farber is a professor of history at Temple University. His books include “The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii,” which he co-wrote with Beth Bailey.
